How do i bake my maps if i get these artifacts?

ivanlyw

Hey guys, anyone here knows how to get a clean bake for my normal maps? I cant seem to bake them maybe due to the normal ray calculations doesnt hit the mesh to cause these artifacts? Im not sure how to go around this. Any help would be appreciated.

Eric Chadwick

What baker? And can you circle the artifacts?

Ghogiel

reduce ray search distances or use a custom cage are possible solutions. 

gvii

Yeah, when using substance painter for bakes without a cage you gotta play with the distances, both of them, to get a good bake. At the end they won't be perfect bakes though, so be prepared for cleanup in some places. Bear in mind that sometimes fixing that issue will cause issues elsewhere when playing with the distances. So check around while you are tweaking values. I also recommend baking id map along with the normal so you can spot issues more easily.

ivanlyw

Ghogiel said:

reduce ray search distances or use a custom cage are possible solutions. 

I googled how to make a cage file and tried using a custom cage obj and it actually works like a charm! Thank you for the advice!

ivanlyw

gvii said:

Yeah, when using substance painter for bakes without a cage you gotta play with the distances, both of them, to get a good bake. At the end they won't be perfect bakes though, so be prepared for cleanup in some places. Bear in mind that sometimes fixing that issue will cause issues elsewhere when playing with the distances. So check around while you are tweaking values. I also recommend baking id map along with the normal so you can spot issues more easily.

Hmm, yea I tried playing with the ray distances, but within my texture set has many different parts of obj within the same UV tile, so if i changed the settings too much to fix the hand artifacts, there would be issues on the other parts, which is why i learnt how to make a cage file for each texture set to bake with. Thank you for the advice!

poopipe

I usually set my distances to 0.01 front and 0.5 rear (when set to bounding box scale) for the  first bake test and work from there. If you're working in world units it's easy to set them up cos you know how big your object is. 

I hardly ever use a cage for non character assets, they generally introduce more artefacts than they fix 

gnoop

I sometimes  just use displace modifier set to displace along edited normals  with b&w texture I paint over an object  to make its surface   hovering slightly above  hi res surface . That way you could use same low poly same object as a cage  when displace  is on. 

To bad Blender doesn't allows to paint displacement interactively  and you have to tweak  something in displace modifier to update  it after each brush stroke.