What he heck is going on now!?

martynball

Baking normal maps now, but now for some reason something has gone wrong. Hense the result below.




Here is the cage setup, I have moved the wheel over so you can see the highpoly. The entire object is like this, not just the wheel.

DEElekgolo

Your cages shouldn't intersect with each other. Explode your mesh's elements along with its cage.

martynball

On the image above it intersects because I moved it so you could see the highpoly. Although there is more intersecting cages on the model, is this the cause of my problem?

Barnaby

Hey sorry to hijack your thread Martyn, but I tried starting my own topic about 8 hours ago, it said it would be approved by a mod, but it's still not posted and I'm desperate for help. Basically whenever I try to render out a normal map I get this ungodly result:



No idea why. I know I have loads of things wrong with my cages and stuff overlapping, but I'm honestly just looking for a sub-par normal map right now, since the deadline for this is in about 13 hours. I've never seen anything like this on the internet before, and I have no idea what the hell is going on. I'm following the "Baking a flawless Normal map" tut on CGTuts, but I'm not exploding my mesh. I'm not sure if that's why it's doing this though, since my friend didn't explode his mesh and his turned out OK.

I'm using 3ds max 2012, although I originally started modelling it in 2011. I hope that isn't the issue, but I unwrapped the whole thing in 2012...

Bryan Cavett

Do you have any overlapping uvs in the 0 to 1 uv space?

Have you reset xforms?

What renderer are you using?

MM

looks like you have overlapping faces or duplicate mesh.

[HP]

It definitely looks like overlapping artifacts. Also, reset your xforms.

Mark Dygert

Overlapping UV's. Offset all but one piece 1 tile to the right/left/top or bottom.


With pieces you want to move, turn on #1. In #2 type 1 and hit enter. It will move those pieces 1 tile to the right. That way they land perfectly on the tileable image but aren't in the renderable space.

You can also switch the editor to UW mode instead of UV and push all of the pieces but one behind the others. UW is depth, its like looking at your pieces from the top down.

It looks like you're using an older version of max to bake? There where problems in older versions where you had to go down to the element level of your low poly and hide everything otherwise it would intersect, even with specific settings set to ignore it. That was annoying... I haven't run into that since 2009.

You should really check out the RTT assist script (available on scriptspot.com) it helps you explode your meshes and bake, great little script, love it.

Also those tires are going to bake horribly you really should round them out better.

cman2k

If nothing else here works, you could try enabling the global supersampler in your render settings. I have used this to get rid of similar weird artifacts in the past...not as bad as this though.