Hi, I'm trying to export from Max into Painter, but when I try baking the normal map in SP, I get a ton of errors. I thought I'd done everything correctly, is there anything that stands out?
I believe you've nailed it sir. My workflow in Max was: create a lowpoly part, create its smoothing groups, unwrap (by SG's), name, create highpoly, name ...move onto the next part. This became an issue at the end when I had to put all of the uv-islands onto the same texture sheet. I wasn't sure what to do. I did try grouping all of the separate components together and then using
various "pack" UV-tools, but none worked.
In the end I found a tut and the guy used 'Attach' ...all (using the list), then 'Quick Flatten'. He created his UV-template, then used a cool script to detach them all again.
I assumed that was the correct workflow, and my mistake was unwrapping and naming each piece as it was made, and not waiting until I'd attached everything together?
Anyway, here's my dodgy UV's (not separated by SG's):
Edit: I don't think those UV's are separated by SG's? Its 5am now, I'll check when I wake up...
I think this mostly comes down to your texel density being low with all these uv islands and which is exacerbating the aliasing youre getting on the shells due to some of them being at angles. I don't use Max and I don't work with smoothing groups so I don't know if theres any issues related to that.
I think this mostly comes down to your texel density being low with all these uv islands and which is exacerbating the aliasing youre getting on the shells due to some of them being at angles. I don't use Max and I don't work with smoothing groups so I don't know if theres any issues related to that.
Are you softening your seams?
Softening seams? -I would've thought 2048x2048 would be fine for a small chair like this, regardless of uv-island arrangment?
Your UV seams, as in where you make the cuts. From the look of that first and third pic, it seems you have them all set to hard.
A 2k texture should be more than enough for a small prop, but seeing as you have a huge amount of UV islands and their TD is very small, you're going to run into issues with aliasing along edges that arent straight. Obviously, we can't make everything a perfect square so thats why it can be beneficial to reduce the amount of UV islands to overall increase the texel density. Just from the bottom portion of that UV snapshot, you can see how many shells are likely facing this problem during the bake.
Here's a link to the best description of texel density around as well as a PDF that covers some of this as well as linking to further resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e6zvJqVqlA
Replies
Are you softening your seams?
A 2k texture should be more than enough for a small prop, but seeing as you have a huge amount of UV islands and their TD is very small, you're going to run into issues with aliasing along edges that arent straight. Obviously, we can't make everything a perfect square so thats why it can be beneficial to reduce the amount of UV islands to overall increase the texel density. Just from the bottom portion of that UV snapshot, you can see how many shells are likely facing this problem during the bake.
Here's a link to the best description of texel density around as well as a PDF that covers some of this as well as linking to further resources: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e6zvJqVqlA