How can I bake high poly detail onto a smooth surface and maintain the smoothness?

Jagerberk · Jun 2020

Hi! I'm a student still learning Max and Substance. For a unit last year I made this however one thing that confused me was how to bake high poly detail onto the wheels whilst maintaining the smoothing group needed to give the wheel it's circular shape? I'm currently working on another model (A Tiger H1) and I've came to the same issue. Any help would be appreciated!

FrankPolygon · Jun 2020

There are several ways to approach this but a good starting point would be to identify the minimum number of unique UVs needed for all the road wheels. As an example: the front faces of the outer road wheels could all have unique UVs to support painting unique camouflage patterns but the inner road wheels, back sides and rims of all the road wheels could share 2-3 unique UVs that are duplicated or mirrored across the rest of the model. Re-using the same UV space and instancing or mirroring the mesh of repetitive details will help save space on the UV map and increase the overall texture density, when compared to using unique UVs for everything.

What's best depends entirely on the artistic goals and technical limitations of the project. If one the requirements is that each road wheel has unique camouflage and mud patterns then re-using UV space might be limited to just the outer rim and back sides of the road wheels. If the texture count and sheet size is limited then it becomes important to maximize space and re-use or mirror as many elements as possible. This is something you'll have to test and evaluate to determine what's right for what you'd like to do with the textures.

Normal baking artifacts can be caused by a variety of issues so the answers to those kind of questions depend entirely on what sort of problems you encounter. Without specific examples of modeling, unwrapping or baking errors it can be difficult to recommend effective solutions. The technical talk section is a great place to ask for help with specific issues. Some good resources for learning about baking and normal bake artifacts are listed below:

Toolbag baking tutorial:

https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/

https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/?page=Map Types#maptypes

https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/?page=Toolbag Setup#basics

https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/?page=Best Results#bestresults

Seams in baked normals:

https://polycount.com/discussion/107196/youre-making-me-hard-making-sense-of-hard-edges-uvs-normal-maps-and-vertex-counts/p1

Waviness in baked normals:

https://polycount.com/discussion/81154/understanding-averaged-normals-and-ray-projection-who-put-waviness-in-my-normal-map/p1

Polycount Wiki:

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Normal_map

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking