Normal map baking

Marivikku

Hi everyone,
I'm trying to explain to a friend of mine how baking works when we encountered a problem, I was wondering if there is any way to solve the issue below without change the topology. The problem we are talking about is the triangle shows in normal map, of course is almost invisible, and as far as I know it's related to texture resolution, but even baking at 8k it's still visible, If I made the low poly model without bevel it won't be visible because of the harden edge that orients the vertex notmal in the right direction.

So back to the topic, this is the artifact on the normal map 
Uv cuts in white where i put harden edge, the rest is soft:


UV layout:


High blue/ Low red


Even if slide the upper edge inwards to better marth the highpoly the artifact is still there.

Kanni3d

Aside from your UVs being strangely unwrapped and laid out/packed, I'm sure it mostly has to do with your entire mesh being having no hard edges in desirable spots. As a result, in some areas it's not shading well. Take a look at how your low-res mesh looks with no wireframe, you may notice that same artifacting is visible in your shading. The issue you're seeing in your normal map is the bake/normals trying its best to counteract that bad shading.

Either add some more loops to support the shading, add some hard edges and split them off into separate uv islands, or maybe try using a FWN script to adjust your normals/tangents on your lowres mesh before you bake.

At a second look, if you didn't terminate this chamfer and continued it through, it'd likely bake fine (same solution as adding more geometry to ease the extreme shading).

Marivikku

Hi Kanni, I wonder why the UV is strange for you, I just lay them out cutting on the bevel (this is just a test so I didn't pack them), I'm really curious about where you would put the sims
anyway I fixed the issue adjusting the vertex normal orientation and leaving an harden edge on the sims. Unfortunately there is no FWN script for maya, do you know any equivalent?

fixed view




Same topology

Ghogiel

Marivikku said:

anyway I fixed the issue adjusting the vertex normal orientation and leaving an harden edge on the sims. Unfortunately there is no FWN script for maya, do you know any equivalent?

Maya has a FWN on by default. (It's just a bad idea to have on by default imo, it's not a very good FWN solution if you are specially wanting to do a modified vertex normal workflow)