Normal map distorted\displaced in Painter bake
Hellom everyone, I'm recently starting my journey in game asset after years of production renders, I used the occasion to also learn Blender, since I never used before. I followed a tutorial for a combat knife model, everything went fine, and now im trying to bake the normals on the low poly but they come out weird and I can't understand why, basically they look "distorted" like you can see in the screenshots, like the lines in the handle should be straight and they're not and many things in the bake dont look straight, moreover theres a weird lighting at the sharp side of the blade right before the seam, even the AO looks wrong, with everything black. I checked the UVs with a checker texture and the squares are proportional, the low/high have all correct names, the pieces are separated and I triangulated them beforehand in blender, do you have an idea on why i might be getting these types of errors? Cause at the moment I have no direction on how to fix this, I've tried many times already, changing the unwrapping.
Replies
First of all I would check how close your low poly model matches your high.If they are close,in my understanding the position in wich rays are fired is too far,hence the distorsions.You can specify that value,if your software allows it (like in xNormal,wich i suggest for baking anyway).If not you can try making a cage and try baking again,it should give desired output.
Disagree on several points
Nobody should be using xnormal in 2022 (or after about 2016 really) - it's obsolete like .tga
Don't use a cage, they're not necessary unless you're dealing with something complex like fingers.
Assuming your high and low Res mesh are closely matched you will be able to fix this by experimenting with hard/soft normals and alternative UV layouts.
ao might be struggling because the mesh is thin. Tick some boxes til it stops.
Showing your UV layout would help a lot with diagnosis
@andreygheorghe @poopipe Thank you guys for your answers, I fixed most of the problems, you were right the low/high meshes were not perfectly aligned, the only thing I can't figure out now is a weird shading on the handguard, the low poly as soon as I import it in Painter has a weird "brown" shade on it that remains ofcourse into the bake too, but only on one side of it. I tried redoing the piece from the high poly, redoing the UV of it or even changing its position, even tried to have it on it's own and not with the other pieces, but the problem persists, what could it be? I'm gonna put the UVs too to give you a better idea.
See which channel the brown stain appears in.
If its ambient occlusion then You can prevent it using 2 sided geometry for that bake otherwiise it's probably one of the projection distance values that need tweaking