Issues with baking

TiredSloth

Hi. I'm working making a set of furnitures with boat themed that are around my house. I got one of the first with good topology and UVs but when I bake it it doesnt look that good so I wanted to try to use a cage but when using it it looks awful. I looked if I might be missing something and all normals are in good direction and none have materials applied. Any idea whi this happens?

THEGary

If I see it correctly one issue could be that the cage you use isn't covering the low and high poly mesh properly.
The cage has to completely capsulate the meshes you're trying to bake with. If the edges of the cage are in the same location as the low, or high poly (basically where you have z fighting) you get this result.

As a first step try to inflate the cage mesh along it's normals. Be careful with how much the cage mesh is extruded, as you should avoid areas where there are small, complex details, as in those places the cage can intersect itself, which can result other issues, like baking things on surfaces that doesn't belong.
So when you adjust the cage size to include everything and there are no self intersections, but there are small sections that are poking out of the cage, you can manually adjust it locally until everything fits nicely.

I hope I could help you.

Fabi_G

Hi! Assuming you're baking in Painter, there should be sliders to control front and back distance of the rays. If using "match by name", check if high and lowpoly are matched correctly. Narrow down the problem by baking only a part of the mesh (plate) - result is good? Increase complexity. Share the meshes if you want people to take a look.

Unrelated, regarding UVs: To minimize aliasing artefacts at seams, consider straightening almost straight UV borders and strip-like UV chunks. To maximize UV space, consider using instances with UVs offset by 1 for repeating elements.

teodar23

Looks like your LP and HP are not in the same place. Check for any rotation differences as well

TiredSloth

Yeah,  still working on this but for now I tried to bevel a few sharp edges which can be necessary such but I can send here the models both the LP and HP and see for yourself how can it be fixed other than UVs.

Fabi_G

Hey, baking the attached meshes in Painter, I can't reproduce the issue shown in the original post. The UV layout looks different, maybe you fixed the issue by now? It seems match by name works with the meshes in the version of Painter I'm using, although I would follow a naming convention (_low, _high) to prevent potential errors. 

While it's WIP, I noticed hard edges with non split UVs, which will lead to artefacts. Especially with round parts, I would try to match the highpoly more closely. Or add some tiling strips to your texture atlas to which you can map UV strips.

Edit: Attached you find modified meshes. Changes include: Renamed parts (_low/_high), split UVs at hard edges, straightened UVs and moved repeating parts UVs by 1.