Home Technical Talk

!NEED HELP! NormalMap Problems(AlwaysFun)

polycounter lvl 8
Offline / Send Message
Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
Hello:)

I have been modeling for quite some time now and baking aswell but i never seem te get it right. There probably is a ton of research but nothing i havent seen yet. So i thought maybe the strong community of polycount can help me on my path to the perfect bake! Lets get Fanatic!


I have added a Sketchfab model with high glossiness so its real obvious where the problems lay. For some reason all over the blankparts there are flakes i cant seem to get that. And here and there i have artefacts.

Here are some screenshots.

The normal map is 8k with 4x4 anti-all.

Hope to here from you soon and thanks for passing by!

Kind regards,


Jochem





Replies

  • Kanni3d
    Offline / Send Message
    Kanni3d ngon master
    Whats your highpoly/source mesh look like? Looks a bit like some noise from bad/weird tesselation
  • Ghogiel
    Offline / Send Message
    Ghogiel greentooth
    I can see your mesh isn't triangulated. I have no idea if the triangulation is the same in sketchfab as the triangulation  was when you baked the mesh. Most apps don't really know what a polygon is and make up their own triangulation rules. So you have to spoon feed them explicitly triangulated meshes or they cannot agree on what a polygon actually is.

    there is quite a lot of compression banding, make sure your normal is baked at 16bit.

  • Ckafee
    Offline / Send Message
    Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
    Kanni3d said:
    Whats your highpoly/source mesh look like? Looks a bit like some noise from bad/weird tesselation

    https://gyazo.com/fbd91e272c77e6160edab31f82b3b162
    Assuming that the waeven part doesnt cause the issie this is the HP
  • Ckafee
    Offline / Send Message
    Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
    Ghogiel said:
    I can see your mesh isn't triangulated. I have no idea if the triangulation is the same in sketchfab as the triangulation  was when you baked the mesh. Most apps don't really know what a polygon is and make up their own triangulation rules. So you have to spoon feed them explicitly triangulated meshes or they cannot agree on what a polygon actually is.

    there is quite a lot of compression banding, make sure your normal is baked at 16bit.


    Allright, so i will triangulate everything. but the not trianglutaded mesh would cause different issues then the compressed normal map right? And where can i set the bit count for my baked maps in XNormal or Substance painter? https://gyazo.com/38e7351a75981c1991ba75278e9aca46

  • Ckafee
    Offline / Send Message
    Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
    Ghogiel said:
    I can see your mesh isn't triangulated. I have no idea if the triangulation is the same in sketchfab as the triangulation  was when you baked the mesh. Most apps don't really know what a polygon is and make up their own triangulation rules. So you have to spoon feed them explicitly triangulated meshes or they cannot agree on what a polygon actually is.

    there is quite a lot of compression banding, make sure your normal is baked at 16bit.

    I Also looked up the depth rate in my image properties in windows and it says 32 bit but i dont know if thats just depth density or the calculated bit rate https://gyazo.com/db3a232568eac25b73bc659820ace70a


  • Kanni3d
    Offline / Send Message
    Kanni3d ngon master
    HP looks fine, doesn't seem to be the culprit


    the not trianglutaded mesh would cause different issues then the compressed normal map right?
    Correct - have your mesh triangulated from your dcc -> baker ->target engine always.

    Been a while since I baked from xnormal, but 32bit is overkill and has diminishing returns - should have similar results to 16bit. See what your results look like after baking with your triangulated mesh and using that same triangulated mesh in your renderer.

  • Ckafee
    Offline / Send Message
    Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
    Kanni3d said:
    HP looks fine, doesn't seem to be the culprit


    the not trianglutaded mesh would cause different issues then the compressed normal map right?
    Correct - have your mesh triangulated from your dcc -> baker ->target engine always.

    Been a while since I baked from xnormal, but 32bit is overkill and has diminishing returns - should have similar results to 16bit. See what your results look like after baking with your triangulated mesh and using that same triangulated mesh in your renderer.


    Hey First of all, Thank you for helping me out and thinking along. Sometimes an extra set of brains can make the difference! :D

    Yes i have tried that here a screenshot of the results. https://gyazo.com/08b07376ff02f0765bb734b55e0004e1
    All meshes are triangulated. I do see different issues according the triangulation shading, but i will fix that after the "compression" Issue.
    I have tried baking in substance painter and XNormal but found that Xnormal did a little bit better job. But the results are quite the same.
    Side note i like how to weaving turned out in my bake. I just really dont get the weird shading when everything is smooth..


  • Ghogiel
    Offline / Send Message
    Ghogiel greentooth
    To bake 16bit in xnormal iirc I used tif. Can't remember the set up exactly to make sure it's 16bit.

    Substance should default the mesh map normal channel to RGB16F, which is 16bit per channel.

    When you check details of a 16bit RGB, the details shows you total bit depth by adding all the floats together. ie a 16bit RGB texture should display 48bits, I suspect you have 8bit RGBA texture there hence why it's displaying 32bit total.

    but since you tried both, you should be getting a 16bit normal bake for sure in substance. so I am not sure whats the issue tbh. 

  • seb3d
    Offline / Send Message
    seb3d polycounter lvl 10
    while higher res bakes and more bit depth can help with parts of your problem i have to say your uv layout shows a lot of wasted space and to be honest your low poly as far as i can tell from the sketch fab looks very bumpy. cant say much about the highpoly from the wireframe screenshot but the low poly geo for sure could need some work so the normal map has less compensation work to do.
  • Ckafee
    Offline / Send Message
    Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
    seb3d said:
    while higher res bakes and more bit depth can help with parts of your problem i have to say your uv layout shows a lot of wasted space and to be honest your low poly as far as i can tell from the sketch fab looks very bumpy. cant say much about the highpoly from the wireframe screenshot but the low poly geo for sure could need some work so the normal map has less compensation work to do.

    In what way do you mean work? As in more geo. And would that fix the problem do you think?
  • seb3d
    Offline / Send Message
    seb3d polycounter lvl 10
    not necessarily more geo. but better and cleaner distribution. i picked an extreme example which is pretty obvious in the sketchfab viewer.

    assuming that blue is somewhat what i think your hp looks in that area and (depending on triangulation) green is your low, your normal tries to compensate for the difference. i think similar areas can be found in other areas of the mesh. so yes your bake would benefit of high and low both being clean geo and matching more closely were they easily can.
  • Ckafee
    Offline / Send Message
    Ckafee polycounter lvl 8
    seb3d said:
    not necessarily more geo. but better and cleaner distribution. i picked an extreme example which is pretty obvious in the sketchfab viewer.

    assuming that blue is somewhat what i think your hp looks in that area and (depending on triangulation) green is your low, your normal tries to compensate for the difference. i think similar areas can be found in other areas of the mesh. so yes your bake would benefit of high and low both being clean geo and matching more closely were they easily can.
    Chears thank you! ill get to work right away! :)
Sign In or Register to comment.