Jagged ugly looking Normal Maps?

madmuffin

My normal bake came out looking extremely jagged on the final model, is it because the texture resolution is too low? The full image size is 1024x2048, I don't really want to bring it up to 2048x4096 if I can help it, but if that is the only way, I will. Does anyone have any alternative ideas?

Gestalt

Try baking with Antialiasing, or bake at a higher res and scale down and normalize the map, usually a photoshop plugin will let you re-normalize.

Joshua Stubbles

Yeah, AA/SuperSampling tends to REALLY slow down the rendering, especially for AO. I'd render it at 2x the res of the final output, resize then run a renormalize Photoshop plugin (xnormal comes with one).

EarthQuake

Rendering AO at 2x takes 4x as long(since its not 2x really, its 4x the size). Its essentially the same thing as enabling supersampling.

madmuffin

I've never baked with anti-aliasing or supersampling or anything before, ill try to find the option in 3dsmax.

meshiah

enable the "hammersley" super sampler on in the render options and turn the quality all the way up.

madmuffin

Thanks, I would have never figured that out on my own. Trying it now!

Joshua Stubbles

EarthQuake wrote: »

Rendering AO at 2x takes 4x as long(since its not 2x really, its 4x the size). Its essentially the same thing as enabling supersampling.

With my AO, I never bake 2x. I just bake it at final res. The aliasing is never really noticable for me after it's textured. It's really just the normal map I double up on.

Supersampling is in the RenderSetup options. Click the Renderer tab and it's under the antialising settings, it's called "Global SuperSampling". Just click enable for max 2.5 star

madmuffin

I'm having another problem now. For some reason whenever I project onto the turbosmoothed highpoly, the resulting bake is completely black. If I collapse all the turbosmooths to editable polygons, then attach them all to one object, then it will bake, but then my scene file gets like 10x larger and max runs about 10x slower, and crashes near constantly.

How come I can't bake off the turbosmooths?

EDIT: Disregard all that, apparently it works just fine now. Odd. I got the Global Supersampling on but I am not sure which antaliasing filter to use. Is just default Area good, because it was already on which clearly isnt working.

Computron

meshiah wrote: »

enable the "hammersley" super sampler on in the render options and turn the quality all the way up.

This should be a good oppurtunity to ask, why? Which settings do the rest of you guys use?

meshiah

i think i rean some tests 5 years or so ago and got a better result, i dont think it will matter to much between the 2. ive just always used hammersey, and never have seen the benefit of changing.
i asked my tech and he said the star maybe a better pattern for hard edged mechanical stuff due to consistent star shape, and hammersly would be a little softer due to the floating of the vertical sampling but this is just a theory.to much work to test or care at this point, i worked out my normal issues long ago.

meshiah

here is a visual he dug up for me,
you'll notice the difference in the top right(hammersley) vs bottom left(star,standard). due to the jitters or random quality any noticeable sampling would appear les uniform in the hammersely. (the way i like it)

http://www.cse.cuhk.edu.hk/~ttwong/papers/udpoint/image/check45.html

madmuffin

Rendered out with multiple options, got the best result with Hammersley as well. Looks great, thanks!

Jessica Dinh

I also think Hammersley works best!

Computron

And since this is just the ray pattern, it shouldn't increase bake time, correct? Anything else I should be doing?

Joshua Stubbles

I use area set to 1.5 I think. Whatever the lowest area goes to.

jeremiah_bigley

I also use a Hammersly at a quality of one but only when I have the time. Using it does increase the render time of a normal map by 10 fold

2048 Normal map can take about 30min to an hour or more on Hammersly.

So sometimes I might go Max 2.5 Star for a bit faster of a render.

supaclueless

personally for me i'm still using max 2.5 star with catmull-rom and my bakes are fairly decent...i've yet to try the different types besides area due to those two working decently for me

SpeCter

When i have enough time , i always use Hammersley+catmull-rom, gives the best results for me so far.