Extracting Normals - High Poly Hard surface

cbellimer

Hi,
I’m currently trying to figure out the workflow for creating game normal maps for hard surface objects. I’ve build a low poly mesh and a high poly mesh. The high poly mesh is built up of many different pieces that simply intersect and I can’t seem to figure out how to get a decent normal map by using the transfer maps tool.



So what I have been doing is taking the high poly mesh that has multiple objects like boards and rivets and just combining them into one mesh. Then I place the high poly over the low poly and attempt to use an envelope to bake the normal map out. My low poly is UVed.
Every time I try this I get the same results over and over again, resulting in a pretty ugly normal map.



Does the transfer maps tool only work if all the high poly objects are merged together seamlessly?? meaning that I can’t just take an object and translate it into another object and combine it? If so, is there another workflow to achieve this?



I attached some screen grabs for some more information....







Thanks
-Cody

BuCC

Is that the UV map for your lowpolly?!
If so it looks like you started working from a few cubes, and just used the default cube UV-map for them to bake your normal map on. I think you'd get much better results if you spent some time UV-mapping your low polly properly. Simply automatic-mapping it should do the trick and produce better normal bakes.
If your UV-map doesn't fit the form of your object you're always going to get poor baking results and texture distortions.

hf UV-mapping

glib

It also looks like you have some overlapping UVs in there.

3devo

not really an expert at normal maps but this should help point you in the right direction
http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map

EarthQuake

the big problem here is that nearly every surface on our highpoly, is tottally planar to your lowpoly. What this means is that nearly all of your details is going to get lost. You usually want some nice soft edges in your highpoly.

cbellimer

yeah, I just took the default uvs I had for a test, I'll do a proper uv layout for the final, but thanks guys for the posts. Thanks eathquake that makes sense. I'll go in there and add some more detail and see if that helps.