Normal maps not baking properly

Tavor

Last couple of days I've had issues baking textures for this asset:





This is the hi-poly:




Normal flats:



I'm mainly using mental ray with 1 - 64 samples per pixel and a 2K texture (I'm planning on using a 1K texture, just wanted to see if I could up the resolution to fix some of it). I may be trying too hard to get that greeble detail in there. Might just model that in.

I've tried xNormal as well, but it only gets rid of the spotty weird artifacts. Ironically, I'm making a wooden asset and both mental ray and xNormal create a pseudo-wood grain when I bake. Might not be a bad effect, but I'd like to know if anybody has an opinion on what's going on here. I've tried adjusting the cage and making sure that there is no duplicate geometry.

throttlekitty

Neat trick

Using max, right? I see people recommend reset Xform and doing something to the stack (collapse probably).

Can't say I've seen black faces come out on the low poly like that.

almighty_gir

did you forget to preheat your oven to 200 degrees? i hear that is what causes most issues with bad bakes.

Mark Dygert

Have you tried scanline? The only thing I use MR for is AO and that kind of rare. It normally makes a mess out of the normal maps... and puts it on a black background which can cause all kinds of issues, even with proper edge padding.

It looks like your low poly is intersecting with the high poly and its causing an issue. If that's the case then maybe you should try going into element mode on the low poly, hide all and then bake.

I've also seen some people suggest going into object properties (right click) and disable "renderable" on the low poly to exclude it from the rendering.

Tavor

Mark: Just switching to scanline worked! Thanks for the tip. I looked through a couple of threads, but now I'm feel confused, though. The reason I use MR is because I saw somewhere mentioned that scanline wasn't as good for normal maps (now I see that is obviously not true), but I think it was mentioned for the viewport not the renderer.

almighty: That made me smile. Everytime I tell somebody I'm baking textures, they look at me funny.

Sorry for the bump.

Also, I forgot to mention that I'm using 3DS Max 2012's own shaders to display the normals. I turned off nitrous, but that didn't seem to actually affect Max's ability to display normals (or AO) in viewport. But I think the "wood grain" effect is actually coming from how Max is trying to do shading. Could be wrong.