UV Seam after Normal bake (sigh)

Kawe

After looking around whole evening yesterday I figured out that this is a very common issue. However I haven't been able to solve it even though I looked through lots of threads as well as the wiki

Applications used: ZBrush, Modo, XNormal and UDK.



So at first I thought it looked pretty good but at a closer inspection ith as many flaws. Some of it is due to me being lazy and using a decimated model from ZBrush. However the biggest issue I found is the UV seam on top of each cliff model... and I don't think it's cause of my low poly.

Here's a closeup:



So after reading up a little and testing various thing I figured it must be because of my normal map bake. Since the model is a lot roudner without the normal map.

What I tried was to split the model along the UV seams since I read somewhere that UDK does that anyway so in order to get a good bake I had to do the same thing. However it didn't help me at all.

I also tried using an cage in XNormal (just pushed it out so it covered the hipoly) and it didn't yield any results either.

Well, I could go through everything I tested. But at the end of the day I still suspect that the issue has to do with the smoothing but since I'm using Modo I'm not entirely sure how I can control this and make sure it's the same in UDK and XNormal.

Oh right, here's the normal map:



....

Upon closer inspection I realized that I also get a seam with the xNormal 3D viewer. So it isn't even baking out correctly.

Maybe I just shouldn't have a seam there? But I couldn't figure out any other way to map this (I did it like a cylinder).

ceebee

Your smoothing looks odd, try averaging your low resolution model's normals in XNormal when you bake.

bbob

What about smoothing groups?

Can you show us how it smooths without the normal map?

Kawe

Your smoothing looks odd, try averaging your low resolution model's normals in XNormal when you bake.

I tried that but it looks the same.

So I even tried to move the seam to somewhere planar just to see if it was smoothing but it creates that edge regardless of where I put the seams.

What about smoothing groups?

Can you show us how it smooths without the normal map?

Here it is:


Modo doesn't have smoothing groups Although 501 claims to have it I haven't seen it work.

JohnnyRaptor

show us the lowpoly mesh inside ur 3d app

Kawe

Here you go. I believe it has like 90 degree smoothing all over the mesh. Not sure if Modo exports that in the obj though. I also tried with 45 degrees just to see if it would help.

And yea.. it's a decimated mesh from zbrush.

JohnnyRaptor

try adding hard edges corresponding to your UV borders, export and rebake

oh, and make sure ur xnormal low definition setting is "use exported normals"

Kawe

I tried all that stuff and I couldn't get it to work properly.

In the end I just moved the seam elsewhere less noticable.

Thanks for all the advice though.