Baking Question

Wolfer

Hi there so I been studying baker more and all. So I feel to help me understand I did this experiment where I try to just bake the details on a simple square. Just a way for me to make this simple and give me a better idea. Now i was able to get a bake detail on top of the square to look right as I made that by extruding a small square on top. However, on the side of the cube, i try to see about baking in detail from the cube part having it where there are some cube holes on it but for some reason they don't come out bake right. Why is that? Now i set the low poly cube to be autosmooth at 180 and all. Here is the result I got from baking.  Also I use blender to make the model and substance painter to bake. This is a simple experiment to help me get a better understanding of baking process more. I know there are tutorial but that talk about baking but want to try it on my own to see if i'm understanding it right.

Eric Chadwick

What does the lowpoly shaded wireframe look like, and what are the UVs?
If you share your model here, someone may be able to help you understand the issues.

I think the best thing may be to read these guides on baking:

• Of Bit Depths, Banding and Normal Maps
• Skew you buddy! Making sense of skewed normal map details.
• Understanding averaged normals and ray projection/Who put waviness in my normal map?

Wolfer

I'll look at the guide but this is something I need to experiment with to make sure I understand it. That why I am just trying out on simple shapes.  Also here is the wireframe and uv of the lowpoly

dimwalker

How problem areas look on normal map, any weird color in those areas?
I would guess rear ray miss, need higher ray distance.

Wolfer

Yeah that might be it. Here is how the normal map comes out. You may be right on that.

wilson66

It generally doesn't make sense to try and bake those deep extrusions onto a flat plane, especially when the extrusions go inward/ outward with a 90 degree angle like in your model. The normal map will not be able to capture this in a sensible way. Normal maps are used to 'fake' more subtle details, deep extrusions like that would need to be represented with actual geometry. Other problems definitely are due to ray depth that needs to be increased.

Wolfer

Oh i see thank you.

gnoop

I totally support what  wilson66   said but  sometimes  you really have to do it that way , normal map only .    Any instanced geometry that multiplies in a frame uncontrollably  and you couldn't have a close  LOD switch  because of  geometry grouping  for example.  Not an issue for Unreal perhaps   with its screen space  Nanite system  but  typically instanced geometry is grouped and a next lod switch could be like 100 meters ahead.     That way you can get gazillion of extra vertexes  in a frame  with those deep extrusions. And if they are not that deep and noticeable    only  the normal map still could be a viable  solution.

 To bake it right you  just need to do that extrusions  not perfectly 90 degree, a bit beveled   and  use Substance Designer baker maybe that allows to use a mask for "skew" fix .   Basically  do perfectly  frontal projection  to surface without  corners skew . You can also just put a support loop to low poly  that you would delete after when cube  sides are split /hard edges and vertex normals/ visible shading  is  perfectly same with such support loop or without.

ps. In fact  if you use Substance painter  you can just "paint" this extrusion   and don't need to bake it at all.