Baking Troubleshooting

samgriffiths

Hello,

I am having some trouble, when I have a lower poly object such as the example below I find it very hard to get a good bake on items such as belts etc.

Please see below.




I always end up having to do so much photoshop post work on the bake, is there a way around this? I'd like to get some nice edges but can never manage it when working with this kind of accessorie.

I hope you understand, please help thank-you

Mark Dygert

What does the UV layout look like? What does the bake look like? What problem areas do you end up cleaning?

There always seems to be a little touch up work that needs to be done with bakes so I don't think you'll get away from it completely but there could be some things someone might be able to suggest if we get a look at more of your process.

So far I think your low poly is a little too low and doesn't conform more closely to your high poly. That will create quite a few problems all on its own.

samgriffiths

I knew it was because of the low-poly budget, I just wondered if there was a way to avoid it, maybe add more loops to the bake cage and adjust those or something.

pior

Bake straight bend later.
As a matter of fact making a full highpoly model for something like that makes close to no sense. Just make a section and stretch it. Think outside the box!

EarthQuake

Baking flat and bending is going to result in that obvious-polygonal look, which may be better than using far too few edges and getting an excessively wavy bake, however i like to use *just the right amount* to make a nice silouhete, which generally means you wont have much worry of excessive wavyness, otherwise you lose the highpoly look, which is the A#1 most important thing in doing a bake, making it look like a highpoly model.

samgriffiths

EarthQuake wrote: »

Baking flat and bending is going to result in that obvious-polygonal look, which may be better than using far too few edges and getting an excessively wavy bake, however i like to use *just the right amount* to make a nice silouhete, which generally means you wont have much worry of excessive wavyness, otherwise you lose the highpoly look, which is the A#1 most important thing in doing a bake, making it look like a highpoly model.

I'm working to a tight polybudget and this isn't possible at the moment, Is baking straight a valid workflow? do people use it alot?

Mark Dygert

I think its worth experimenting with and see how it looks, people do that all the time with hard to unwrap objects. Build it straight, unwrap it, then mangle it. This would be one more step but I think it will work pretty well. Considering normal maps bend twist and deform when animated I'm not aware of some technical reason that would prevent you, (someone corrects me in 3, 2...)

It might even come out better if you bake it when its straight. If you bake it curvy it might attempt to put some of the waviness and distrotion into the normal map and make it shade oddly if it ever straightens out or deforms another way.

Even if you bake straight if you're unable to add enough geometry to get a good bake or deformation, it will show through when it bends. Hopefully you're baking this with only one horizontal UV seam? Wherever the seams are at it will probably cause some issues which with some fudging can be minimized, but its good to hide it well. I suggest using the inner most lower loop as the solitary horizontal UV seam.

You probably want to add some supporting loops to at least the horizontal edges if you want them to come out as smooth as possible. But that should be easy to experiment with.

Also make sure you don't have any hard edges (or everything is set to smoothing group 1) on your low poly other wise it breaks your cage and causes seams.