What is wrong with my normal map?
Hello! Sorry if this isn't where/how I'm supposed to ask, I have never posted before.
Creating this texture is part of a school project. Only one of my instructors knows 3D software well enough and he doesn't usually answer me when I have questions. I only have access to Blender, Substance and ZBrush.
I began by modeling this fan shape against one I found online as a reference, in Blender. I used curves and parented the cubes to the curves for the shape, and sculpted the details in ZBrush. I know the spacing is a bit weird, but it is my first time making a tiling texture of this shape & I have limited time. I've made several other tiling textures using the same modeling/sculpting method, and then baking on to a plane, but they all had a more uniform shape and did not give me this sort of issue.
In the first photo you can see my low poly.
The second photo is how it looks when I arrange them in a repeating pattern. It is as symmetrical as I can make it.
In this third photo, each corner vertex of my plane is snapped to the center origin of the respective fan shape.
fourth is how my normal map looks after baking
Finally, here are the weird seam issues that result when I put an array on this plane. It's as if the normal map is cutting off exactly where that blank space is.
When I have baked in substance for my other textures, sometimes there are blank spaces like this on the normal map, but they never cause an issue when I eventually use them on planes in Blender/UE4
I've been trying this for 2 days--different ray distances, different spacing for the pattern, changing position and size of the plane, asking friends, Googling and nothing has solved it yet. Hoping someone can help, thanks a bunch
Creating this texture is part of a school project. Only one of my instructors knows 3D software well enough and he doesn't usually answer me when I have questions. I only have access to Blender, Substance and ZBrush.
I began by modeling this fan shape against one I found online as a reference, in Blender. I used curves and parented the cubes to the curves for the shape, and sculpted the details in ZBrush. I know the spacing is a bit weird, but it is my first time making a tiling texture of this shape & I have limited time. I've made several other tiling textures using the same modeling/sculpting method, and then baking on to a plane, but they all had a more uniform shape and did not give me this sort of issue.
In the first photo you can see my low poly.
The second photo is how it looks when I arrange them in a repeating pattern. It is as symmetrical as I can make it.
In this third photo, each corner vertex of my plane is snapped to the center origin of the respective fan shape.
fourth is how my normal map looks after baking
Finally, here are the weird seam issues that result when I put an array on this plane. It's as if the normal map is cutting off exactly where that blank space is.
When I have baked in substance for my other textures, sometimes there are blank spaces like this on the normal map, but they never cause an issue when I eventually use them on planes in Blender/UE4
I've been trying this for 2 days--different ray distances, different spacing for the pattern, changing position and size of the plane, asking friends, Googling and nothing has solved it yet. Hoping someone can help, thanks a bunch
Replies
You can try a few things. What I would do is adding a plane behind the high poly tiles so that it bakes well, without padding and with actual information there.
What you can also try is using photoshop to clone the shape from the baked normal map on top and bottom of your normal map, so that it is continuous, sort of like this: This would be a "hackish" way of doing it and IMO not a good solution, you should try to fix the issues in the origin while you can.
Also, like sprunghunt mentioned, in this case you should really be using 100% of UV space.