Problem with Baking Normals

Luce

Hello everybody, I am self-taught and trying my best to learn how to make game assets.
I am trying to make a revolver game-ready asset, but I am facing some difficulties when baking the normals.

The problems with the baking can be seen here:

As you can see I have these edge lines showing, and some black and not defined edges.
My LowPoly looks like this:


and my HighPoly is this:

It looks to me like I should not have triangulated the edges in the LowPoly, but I thought that it would have to be exported triangulated anyway...
The UVs are packed in 2048x2048 with 8px padding (the same setting I use when baking) and look like this:

In particular the object in question has these UVs:

If you guys need any more information I would be happy to provide it, Thanks a lot for the help, really means a lot.
Have a great day!

pxgeek

It's good practice to triangulate.

However, your low poly wireframe shows some polys triangulated and others not. Are you sure you're triangulating the entire mesh?

Luce

pxgeek said:

It's good practice to triangulate.

However, your low poly wireframe shows some polys triangulated and others not. Are you sure you're triangulating the entire mesh?

Hello, thanks for the reply.
Yes, i triangulated the LowPoly when I exported it in fbx, I updated the screenshots of the post with the triangulated LowPoly used for Baking.

pxgeek

It looks like you might need to separate the smoothing of your low poly to match your uv shells.

Its a little hard to tell from the screenshots.

Luce

pxgeek said:

It looks like you might need to separate the smoothing of your low poly to match your uv shells.

Its a little hard to tell from the screenshots.

Generally speaking am i correct in thinking that the shading of the low poly is not important when you bake with an HighPoly? 
Let me explain it better, in the LowPoly is possible to see similar lines forming on the barrel, am I correct to think that normally those lines should go away? Or do I need to have a good shading before baking?

Fabi_G

Hi! I recommend to check out the wiki to get an overview. Maybe do some simple tests. 

Edit: The shading of the lowpoly is important. The greater the difference between shading of lowpoly and highpoly, the more work the normal map has to do. And the amount of information a texture can store is limited. To control the lowpolys shading, hard edges, bevels or support loops can be used. As noted in the wiki, when baking tangent space normal map, UVs need to be split at hard edges.

pxgeek

Normal maps are meant to override the shading, but generally, yes; you want a good low poly to get clean, predictable bakes.

If your low poly model also has smoothing errors, you've likely got some underlying geometry issues that are independent from how you baked it.
And if you're deriving your high poly from the same low poly mesh then of course you're bound to have issues. (No way for us to know how it was constructed but something to keep in mind)

Luce

Yeah, that's defenitely the issue, i will work on it again and this time I will make it clean! 
Thanks guys

poopipe

pxgeek said:

Normal maps are meant to override the shading, but generally, yes; you want a good low poly to get clean, predictable bakes.

to be pedantic... 
Tangent space normal mapping should be viewed as a modification to the low poly surface normals rather than a replacement/override (because that's exactly what it is). 

object/world space normal mapping is more like a replacement