Normal map looks bent

csprance

Hello Polycounters!

I'm having trouble with baking out some of my normal maps. I'm using modo and xNormal most of the time (one or the other, sometimes both) to bake my maps and everytime I bake a flat surface it turns out looking like it's pushed in.

Pictures:


See that shading line running down the middle?


I created my Uv's in modo unwrapping and relaxing everything.



I created my low poly using modo and the constrain to background function.

Everything has one smoothing group and I've hidden most of my seams (the one in the middle is hidden by a pipe.)

What can i do to make that shading line go away and restore the illusion of being a mostly flat plane?

Computron

you should split the smoothing groups where your UV and Material splits are as well as have at least 16 pixels of padding for maps over 1024

Wesley

It might help if you also post your normal map.

Frankie

I'm not sure I ever got a good bake out of Modo...
Where are you going to put it in the end? Maybe you should test there rather than Modo. If you bake and test inside Xnormal should give the correct result.

igi

You should always set the opacity of normal map as %50 because Modo's viewport doubles up the normal strench so that weird bumpiness occurs.This might solve your problem if there is no baking related issues.

csprance

Well, i figured it out.

I was getting the errors because i didn't have enough edges in place to make sure the shading on my low poly was correct. I guess it was just to large of a space to shade over and created that curved surface.

I just put the extra edges in my bake model and left them out in the game model and all is well.

Adam L. Gray

here, this should give you an idea of what's going on:



That being said though, using something like the 3Point shader modifier in max might fix this, but, it won't make much of a difference in-game. That being said however, you can usually get away with only using two edges every now and then anyway, when it's not too obvious

Cheers

Frankie

I think igi is most likely to have it right, having said that if that's the problem with modo it probably has much worse errors in its normal map pipeline. Adam sorry that diagram is wrong, the normal map should absolutely be able to correct that smoothing and adding the extra edge like in the diagram doesn't totally remove the smoothing errors, although obviously it would help but its a bit misleading suggesting that as cause and solution.

csprance

Yep. Thanks adam, that's a great diagram and it fixed my problem. Somewhat....i didn't use a 3 point edge but I did insert an extra edge which fixed the problem. I haven't tested lowering the opacity but I saw the errors in the normal itself so I knew it was a baking error. Thanks for the help!

kodde

Not sure if you solved this completely, but are you baking and retaining the same vertex normals when viewing your model? To me it looks like you might have baked with averaged/smoothed vertex normals, then applied this result to your lowpoly which has hardened/flat vertex normals.