Normal issues

Reverenddevil

I am having some issues with my normals transferring on my model. I planar mapped the side of the sphere where I want my normals to transfer. As you can see my normals are getting pixelated and just not transferring very well. I am also getting an issue with the normal and the UVs seem to crop the outer edges off the normal detail, what is the best way to remedy this?

MoP

Well, at that resolution of course they'll be pixelated. They're only pixels, after all.
If you zoomed in on that image and looked at the green and red channels each on their own, you'd see that it's nowhere near as smooth as it appears at first glance.

The only way you're going to get "less pixelation" in this case is to either give the object more UV space in your texture map, or double the size of the texture itself.

nome_sane

It's hard to tell whats going on. How did you generate those normals? It looks like they have been generated from a flat surface and then projected onto the sphere. You could probably get a nicer result if you actually modeled the high poly version of the sphere part and baked it.

Reverenddevil

I did model my normal and transfered it to a flat plane then applied to my uv map. So, you would reccomend just taking my high poly sphere and model the detail I want and transfer it? Thanks.

MoP

Yes, if you're baking to a low-poly model, you should always bake directly from your highpoly source... and your highpoly source should be roughly the same shape/volume as your lowpoly in order to get the best bake.

Rob Galanakis

It may not be possible in this case, but you can model the circle entrance as a 'strip' instead of a circle, and it will reduce the pixelation artifacts by a ton. To get a sharp diagonal line on a normal map texture you need lots of resolution, to get a flat line on a normal map you need much less (and it will look better when mipped).