Weird bake

Dim

I've been having some weird issues baking out a normal map and was wondering if anyone had encountered anything similar.

Here's the result:



And here's the object I'm baking from:



I can't figure out the problem. I'm using Blender 2.48, but I don't think it has anything to do with the program itself since I've baked countless flawless maps from it. Also, though in my image, the two meshes aren't sharing the same space, it doesn't matter the distance I provide between the two. Also, why flipping my normals changes the outcome, it doesn't improve it. Inverting my normals provides this:



Am I doing something fundamentally wrong here?

Thanks is advance for any help.

LEViATHAN

Never really used Blender, but you could try XNormal for baking.

Michael Knubben

Well, I'm sure he could do it in Blender as well. It seems to be doing something strange to the geometry, in that it reads it as if it was actually much more extruded and clipping into itself. At least, that's what the normalmap looks like. Your uv's are just one quad laid out flat, right?

Eric Chadwick

I haven't used Blender, but you could try changing the Margin value to 0, because it almost looks like an edge padding problem.

SHEPEIRO

are you using displacment, only asking as it looks like an object thats been displaced (or inflated) along the vertex normals twice, which would give that blobby clipping itself look as Pea said. weird that it looks correct in viewport though

Michael Knubben

Eric: that's what I though initially, but seeing as how that's just one quad, I doubt he's got more than one uv island.

I think Shepeiro's onto something, in having said what I meant, only less confusing.
Dim: could you walk us through your settings for this? Maybe there could be something there?
Also, going off of Shep's comment... since Blender has a modifier stack now, do you have a push/bevel/whatever modifer turned on that's not set to be visible in the viewport?

Just guessing!

Michael Knubben

Oh, also: Seeing as the latest Blender has improved hlsl support and all that, and if you need to get this baked urgently: you might want to look into applying a normalmap-material, one of those that actually give your model those colours, so you can just take a top viewport screenshot, and that'd be your normalmap...

Dim

Thanks for replying guys.

@Eric: Setting the margin value seems to have no effect.

@SHEP: I had used a displacement modifier, but, because I was going to sculpt it, I applied that modifier first, so what you see now in my viewport is just absolute geometry, no gimmicks or modifiers at all.

@Pea: I'm not sure exactly what settings would be most helpful to you, but all my baking options are shown in the viewport screen above under the "Bake" panel. I've also tried baking out displacement and AO maps with the same result. Regarding your method for extracting a normalmap: it sounds like a very complicated material, but I'll give it a try.

Thank you all for your responses.

Dim

Heh, so I tried something (exporting to .obj, then reimporting and baking), and it worked. This means that some value was applied to the mesh's properties that shouldn't have been, probably through the displacement modifier. Exporting it stripped that off. I guess I found the first bug of the new 2.48. I'll send it along and try to get it fixed.

Thank you again for all your help.

Edit: I can't seem to reproduce the bug though, so I can't really report it.

AnimeAngel

report it anyway with all the information you can provide. it might help them narrow it down because others may have reported a similar issue.