Ye Old Normal Map Cylinder bowl throwing me for a f##! loop.

oXYnary

Without adding any more loops, can I do something to fix? (Basically cause it literally took about 1.2a day to set up the cage. Adding more geometry resets the cage. Tweaking existing and adjusting uv does not).



If Im being too perfectionistic, let me know. I can kinda clean it up by tweaking each channel individually if need be. The uv island though it right there.

MattLichy

Use Offset and set it to like 2 or less and see what that does.

I don't like using the cage if possible. Takes waaay to much time, and usually still has issues.

Some of those surfaces though, where u let the Sub-D take care of the curve for u, you may have to add more verts. But try the offset first. It wont wreck your cage, it just wont use it for the ray cast.

Adam L. Gray

MattLichy: You really should use a cage when baking, depending on the object you could get horrible results

Mostly you'd just get away without it on organic, like, animals and simpler human meshes I think, but even there you really ought to, only takes a couple of mins.

oXYnary: What you could do, is try to clean it up in PS as you said, if it doesn't work too well, you could always try doing something like this:

Snight

Unfortunately to completely fix this problem you need to add more geo to your low poly. Why did it take you a day to set up your cage?

EarthQuake

Remove some of the excessive bevels you have there, and instead add more sides to the cylinder, if you can cut 2 edge loops out there, and you can probably double the sides at the same tri count.

oXYnary

I tried what EQ said and moved some of the loops to the side and reduced the amount of bevels on bottom. Two attempts. One with no bevel at all and using another smoothing group, another with a slight bevel. Both couldn't resolve the area. I did figure out a blocker in the xnormal helped with some of the overlap/bake from other areas of the mesh.

Just gonna give up on this attempt and do ye old 1 channel PS cleanup. Thanks for the suggestions all. Maybe someday something will "click". The idea I have been working till this time if the angle of the area is at or more than 90 degrees, you either need to bevel or make a separate smoothing group and uv island. If its a concave area, smoothing group (because the bevel will fall into itself if cage pushed enough). If convex, bevel.

MattLichy

Did you try doing the offset and not cage?