Tris causing normal map issues

Ahsan55

This is a watch for the character I'm currently working on
Smooth shaded

Weighted normals
Wireframe of tris. Had to add this bevel because my lowpoly couldn't catch the bevels in that area even after I manually adjusted the cage in blender
 UVs

Normal map(smooth shaded)

poopipe

What's the problem?

Ahsan55

See first two images

pxgeek

How does the high poly look? Does it also have that shading artefact?

Ahsan55

No issues I can see  

pior

- The first thing to check is the direction of the ray being cast (literally : along the normal of the face). Perhaps this tiny triangle is ever so slightly bent.

- Now besides that, the way you've built the lowpoly for this watch asset doesn't make much sense. You have these minuscule dense bevels on the areas where the strap attaches, yet you are using very low density in other places that would benefit from some extra geometry.

If you have that much of a polygon budget to work with (allowing for such tiny bevels), then you should use this budget in ways that are worth it - hence relying much less on the normalmap in order to correct the shading.

Neox

just look at the lowpoly mesh without wireframe. 

the shading is just very strong. without more resolution and probably 16bit depth, the normalmap can only do so much. ideally you want as little shading as possible in your lowpoly.

you can achieve this by using extra chamfers (costs more geo) or using hard edges on UV seams, where it makes sense. any angle around and above 90° i would just harden to relief stress from the normalmap.

as this is a hard surface object with a lot of steep angles, looks like converting UV seams to hard edges can be done without any extra edits or thoughts, so this would be the first thing i would try.

personally i would also straighten the pieces that are almost straight anyways

with your smooth shading you should also definitely resolve these ngons into quads/tris

Ahsan55

yes the normals appear to be slightly bent should I manually rotate them or something
to your second point the low poly isn't finished yet I'm just trying to sort the baking issues  low poly without bevel

Ahsan55

thanks @Neox hardening the edges reduced the artifact just enough so that you cant see it unless you get really close and view it from an angle. should I stop here or try to remove it entirely Regular view
 Viewed from a specific angle
Edit: Fixed it completely by playing around with the shading and hardening more edges. Thanks everyone for your help.

Neox

Wait until that normalmap is compressed and it might get worse.
If you close enough you can always find something. The question is, how close will you ever get?
I guess if you re structure this area to not have this long thing triangle youd balance it out more. Or you need to give the try more space in the UVs so there are enough pixels to handle it.

But then again, how close will you be? Whats the Usecase? Check it out at its purpose to decide if you want to fix something that is visible when you crawl in super close.