Baking problems :/

FrozenCore#6

Ok I Made The Low Poly Ak74u , Uv Mapped It And Trying To Bake

But i've Been Having Alot of Errors Which Are Really Annoying me And Wasting My Time.

I was testing the bake on 1 part just to make things easier the cage is covering everything and its close to the object. but i keep getting empty pieces in the normal map and the Bg Isn't Filled With That Purple Like color , So I Saved A PNG And filled the Bg With The color And Applied It To The Low Poly .... Ugly Outcome

K Here Are Piccys For Everything and There Is A Download Link Under Them In case U Wanna Check out The Thing Upclose ...

It's Only 400 KB So Dont be Lazy :P









Download:

[href=http://depositfiles.com/files/wqswokoka]http://depositfiles.com/files/wqswokoka[/href]

Wombatinahat

You want to add some chamfered edges to that low poly it will help the normal out no end. And sort out your smoothing. Tho if you chamfer all those 90 degree edges you should be able to just have 1 smoothing group

Piflik

You have to hide the Lowpoly if you bake with MRay...nit the Objrct, but the Geometry...simply add a edit Poly Modifier beneath the Projection Modifier and there select all Polygons and Hide them...you cann then turn off/delet the Modifier after/between baking...(you have to turn it off if you want to edit the Projection-cage...)

FrozenCore#6

Thanks Alot People That halped Alot but now i Only Got 1 Problem ..
The Normal map Has Some Disorted Pixels Around All The Edges How do I Fix That up?

dansher

i dont know much about normal mapping, in fact i havnt done any but couldnt you just blur the areas that are distorted in PS?

perhaps use the lasso selection tool to get the shapes of the objects (or the circular tool for the round one) then with it selected go along with the blur tool so soften the edges up while still keeping the shape

FrozenCore#6

I Would If it Was Any Other Map .. If i Try It On The Normal Map I Would Lose Quite Alot Of Detail

I Already Have Some Lost Detail Becuz of Those Pixels

EarthQuake

1. What you're seeing is pixel padding, it is essential to keep your texture from looking like crap when it mips down.
2. You should have MORE of it, not less. "Padding" in RTT options, turn it up to like 32 or something.

What padding does is stretches the similar pixels out past the bounds of the uvs, so you shouldn't be seeing this on your actual model, and if you are something else is wrong. This is usefull because instead of black, or even a flat 127,127,255 color(which you should set your NM bg color to), when your texture gets resized for mip mapping it will pull a similar value there, instead of a black or neutral(127,127,255) value. Without padding you will get really bad seams when your object isn't view upclose and mip mapping occurs.

Eric Chadwick

More about padding
http://wiki.polycount.com/EdgePadding

FrozenCore#6

I'm not entirley sure If i Understand What padding Does . But For The mean Time When I Turned Up The Padding To 32 I Still Got The Wierdo Pixels on The Inside..

KonataNX

FrozenCore#6 wrote: »

I'm not entirley sure If i Understand What padding Does . But For The mean Time When I Turned Up The Padding To 32 I Still Got The Wierdo Pixels on The Inside..[/IMG]

Try using xNormal to bake it, maybe it would help?:\

EarthQuake

FrozenCore#6 wrote: »

I'm not entirley sure If i Understand What padding Does . But For The mean Time When I Turned Up The Padding To 32 I Still Got The Wierdo Pixels on The Inside..

Alright, well the pixelation here on the inside is a result of a couple different things now.

1. Whenever you use hard edges(smoothing groups) you need to have a uv split/seam as well. If you do not, you'll get these nasty edge artifacts you're seeing.

2. Adjusting your anti-aliasing settings and turning on multisampling may help.

You should read this thread: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?p=1194664#post1194664

Mitchell Ford

I am pretty new here on the forums but I figured you have to start some where. There are always a few things I keep in mind when I am baking detail from high poly to low poly via normal map.

1. always make sure that the high and low and as close to on top of each other as they can be so that your cage need the least amount of distance possible.

2. projecting onto a 90 degree angle is no going to work. you have to have an angle greater then 90 degree for the projection to look right although I am sure that there are exceptions. try to make sure that your low poly has no 90 degree (or less) angles.

3. Smoothing groups: very important for baking normals. i find that 90% of the time if you use the auto smooth button it works just fine. If not they you have to do your own smoothing groups.

4. UVW unwrap: I find that more often than not, baking problems come down to unwrap. like texturing, a good unwrap is more than half the battle. same with normal map baking. if you don't have good UV's then you won't get a good bake.

5. normal maps are not set in stone. almost always you are going to have little fractures and glitches in your normal map when you bake it. its not going to be perfect. Every time i bake a normal map I throw it into photoshop and clean it up and /or deepen it by changing the levels on the red and green channels.

well I hope this helps

FrozenCore#6

@ Earthquake .. I'm Pretty new To 3Ds Max This Is My First model In Max So I Dunt really Know My Wat Around The Menus But I Went To The pixel Sampling Options And Checked Off Jitter .. Increased Padding Samples . And Now I Got A Nice Smooth NM But Some parts Were Over Lapping or So .. So I Tried Cutting The UV Edges And It Worked Pretty Well I Got A Nice Correct NM But Some Of The Jitter Came Back

I Checked The Channel Options Of The NM And Corrected Them ..

@Mitchell Ford

Thank You For The Post But I Already Went Over Most Of The Points ..

My UV Map is Pretty Ugly But It Doesn't have Over Lapping And The Checkered Texture Looks Pretty Nice On it , I used Maya For UV Mapping Since It's easier For Me I made My Own Seams And All is good .. So Do i Need any Other Edits? o,o

As For Photoshopping I Would Fix It Up but The Problem Is That I'm Gonna Have These Problems On Multiple Objects So it Would take Ages And I Know That I Got Something Wrong With My baking So I'm Trying Fix It As Much As I Can :S

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Here Is My Latest NM Result :



And The Latest Update To My Testing Object

3Ds File . Ak74u Baking test

Piflik

Seriously...Writing Like This Makes It Really Hard To Read And It Doesn't Make It More Likely To Be Heard...

Actually I found it quite hard to write like this on purpose...so why do it?

FrozenCore#6

Hmm lol alot have been complaining about it . and i got used to it .. but I'll try stop