Arr, normals baking problem with xNormal

2cat

I'm probably doing a lot of things wrong, but this is my first time baking normals. I also tried to bake them to a simple plane, that worked just fine.

Also this is just a test, there is pinching at some of the corners> I don't really care about those right now since I've spent a few days screwing around trying to fix this. Also the UV layout isn't really optimal, but yeah, I can fix that later.

My workflow:
I made a low poly shape,
I then added turbo smooth and added support edges to make them hard and square.
I then UV'd the low poly with separate islands since they're all hard edges. Also because I don't know how to smooth the normals like you can in Maya.

If I'm not providing the right information, feel free to ask for more. I'm sorry if its not sufficient.

Alright, here are a few pictures:

My normal:


Lowpoly + normal

My Highpoly

Highpoly wires without turbosmooth

Highpoly wires with turbosmooth






EDIT:

Alright. I went back to 3DS Max and applied an Edit Normals modifier to my lowpoly. I then unified all my normals. I feel that it went a step in the right direction, however I have a new problem.

Below is my new normal map. As you can probably see most of the map should be a solid blue, because all the faces are mostly flat. Its extremely "hilly" though.



Here's the normal applied to my lowpoly object. You can see the wavyness of the normalmap on the flat surfaces and there's still this ugly crease around the outer edge.






So yeah, it has improved slightly. But I'm still screwing something up.

PredatorGSR

You need to keep hard normals wherever you have extreme angles, roughly 70s and higher, depending on how your rendering engine works. The reason you have the seams is that by default xnormal uses surface normals to bake instead of geometry normals. You need to use a cage to bake to get proper normals around edges. To make a cage from your low poly, in max just apply a push modifier and increase it a small amount so the high poly is completely inside the cage. In xnormal, right click on your low poly slot and select the option to add a cage and choose the cage you've exported from max. The cage needs to have exactly the same info as the low poly, because it just calculates between the identical vertices. So if you change uvs or anything, you need to re-export the cage.

2cat

Mk, just posting to say I fixed it. I'll probably post some questions later.