Trying to get a better understanding of baking normals

Boosted24v

So I've read a lot of the tutorials and have come a long ways being able to bake things but I'm still very much a FNG..or uh..rookie haha. so I modeled some simple assets to try an really iron out all the kinks in my work flow, right now I use blender for base meshes and UVs, zbrush for highpolys and substance painter for baking and textures. I also have marmoset but to be honest I don't know the difference in the bakers. (The overall goal is making assets for UE4 game dev)  But anyway to the point, here are my low polys, high polys and the result. All three were made out of 12 sided cylinders. The regular cones came out perfect aside from the bottoms being "burnt" for some reason i don't know. but the barrel came out the worst. Is it just too low poly? should i have used a larger edge count? or is there something else going on. I figured i'd ask here before trying something else, just in case.

Low

High

Bake

Taylor Brown

Your assumptions were correct. The discrepancy between the high and low is too drastic to capture all the information from the high. There's tons of super thorough posts going over this very concept (probably going as far back as the last 15 years!) so do some digging and you'll be in a better place for it. Fairly certain the user FrankPolygon has covered this many times in the past so look up his post history. Total gold mine!

Boosted24v

Taylor Brown said:

Your assumptions were correct. The discrepancy between the high and low is too drastic to capture all the information from the high. There's tons of super thorough posts going over this very concept (probably going as far back as the last 15 years!) so do some digging and you'll be in a better place for it. Fairly certain the user FrankPolygon has covered this many times in the past so look up his post history. Total gold mine!

Thanks ill have to keep digging up more info, some of the video tutorials I've seen have either been like super technical and I'm left like "whatttt?" or others i feel aren't specific enough to whatever situation I was dealing with at the moment. I scrapped the low poly models and went with 32 sided cylinders instead. I guess I blame my inexperience in whats generally accepted for polycounts in different items but I guess it'll be a whole lot of trial an error until I'm finally settled into things.

guitarguy00

The side count is simply much too low. There is no way 12 sides will follow the curve of a subdivided cylinder. You need more sides, something like 24 or 32 would suffice. There are other tricks or baking rules to follow such as trying to keep your UV shells as straight as possible(if possible) as this helps with minimizing aliasing but that doesn't seem to be an issue here.

DavidCruz

So i got bored doing my current thing and i wanted to see if the 12 sided issue could be used at all.  If you are restricted in whatever you are attempting it can be done but i guess it doesn't look all that, but then again its just a cone/drum, didn't add handle or this wouldn't have been as fast as it was.
Before subdividing, i chamfered very lightly with a setting of 3 along each edge of the 12 sided cone, seems fine to me but if its smooth you are after then yes it wouldn't work out too well without some major tinkering.  <This is just an example of the 12 sided thing, not trying to add more confusion i wanted to see if it was truly horrible to use, plus i never made a cone before.

After change with just subd and motion blurring errors(wavyness) straight(i know bad) on the normals:

@Kanni3d
Thanks, me rushing = errors. ^this one isn't how you mention it i just wanted to see one last time if i could do it without fiddling with it but yes your way looks great.  Will keep that in mind next time, didn't even cross my mind so saved.

Kanni3d

@DavidCruz

Best to not chamfer the vertical edges of the cylinder as those wouldn't need to be normal mapped anyway. Something like this would've made more sense.



But yes, totally correct on the fact that if you're limited to using something as low-res nature as this, avoid using sub-d, and simply chamfer your required edges to be baked down. 

Boosted24v

Off the original topic but is there any disadvantage to say modeling a road cone, and doing the whole process texturing etc by itself, and then another item like say the barrel and so on an so forth, verses, making them all in one project and doing their UVs and textures together in one file?

Kanni3d

Really isn't any disadvantage to that, as they both are simple enough assets - but it would be best to treat them as separate projects, as they'd naturally have separate textures/uv spaces etc. Doing it separate like so will just help you get used to treating assets in that manner as well.

Boosted24v

I thought it'd be a lot simpler doing it separate,  I just wasn't sure if having everything in a different projects would chip away at performance in UE4. But definitely plan on bangin out a bunch of small simple assets to nail down the work flow, start building an asset library at the same time.

Kanni3d

Yes, in production, having multiple assets that would normally be on screen at once reference one texture set (instead of a few) reduces many drawcalls, but in your instance, I really wouldn't worry about overhead performance in engine when all you are doing is just portfolio/practicing.

Boosted24v

Ok thank you that is what I was wondering. Hopefully not too far off from making decent simple props, but a lot of areas in the pipeline I have to smooth out.