Some Normal Map Baking issues

HTLu

I'm making my hipoly and baking normals onto my lowpoly but during the process I'm not sure why my normals come out w/ so much noise.

I have checked smoothing groups on the pieces but those are ok, I don't have lights in the scene, and Gamma and Lut is disabled, also for the lowpoly I set materials on default materials, so I'm not sure how to fix this.
If you zoom into the normals map you can see little white dots sprinkles across the normals map, and these are the red dots in the preview render.


Please Help!

gamma and lut not enabled :

test render with normals applied on the lowpoly:

Normals map:

zoomed in :

normal preview render:

Ace-Angel

Mental Ray? Ditch it and go with Standard, 2.5 star.

HTLu

Ace-Angel wrote: »

Mental Ray? Ditch it and go with Standard, 2.5 star.

Thanks I'll try that.

Oh but I'm using Default Scanline, not using mental ray.

jeremiah_bigley

Yeah my first guess would have been mental ray. Why is your preview a yellowish color? That leads me to believe that you have a strange material on one of the pieces you are baking. Should be a standard gray material with nothing in it to make sure you are getting a clean cast.
I have seen instances where a material can seriously screw up the cast.

If all else fails... I would suggest merging into a new file with clean settings and applying a standard gray material to everything and trying it again.

jeremiah_bigley

What casting method are you using? Cage or offset? Because this effect might be also achieved by resetting the cage and not pushing it back out.

KSMO

HTLu

jeremiah_bigley wrote: »

What casting method are you using? Cage or offset? Because this effect might be also achieved by resetting the cage and not pushing it back out.

I'm using Cage.

HTLu

jeremiah_bigley wrote: »

Yeah my first guess would have been mental ray. Why is your preview a yellowish color? That leads me to believe that you have a strange material on one of the pieces you are baking. Should be a standard gray material with nothing in it to make sure you are getting a clean cast.
I have seen instances where a material can seriously screw up the cast.

If all else fails... I would suggest merging into a new file with clean settings and applying a standard gray material to everything and trying it again.

I reapply materials to the default materials and rebaked but its still get that error.

Xenobond

Do you get the same results when rendering to a texture with dimensions as power of 2? I see that the ones you've put up are 1600x1600.

I've never not done power of 2s, so do not know if Max doesn't like that.

HTLu

Xenobond wrote: »

Do you get the same results when rendering to a texture with dimensions as power of 2? I see that the ones you've put up are 1600x1600.

I've never not done power of 2s, so do not know if Max doesn't like that.

oh I'm sorry the 1600 x1600 is just the size of the image, I render it in 2048 x2048 or 1024 x 1024

Jessica Dinh

Are you baking with Hammersley or Max 2.5 Star? I've gotten these artifacts with Max 2.5 Star before and Hammersley cleans them right up for me.

HTLu

Jessica Dinh wrote: »

Are you baking with Hammersley or Max 2.5 Star? I've gotten these artifacts with Max 2.5 Star before and Hammersley cleans them right up for me.

I was baking with Hammersley =(

Jessica Dinh

aw sadness

Ace-Angel

Did you do all the standard clicks? Like Reset XForm, reset pivot, add an Edit Poly Modifier, collapse it, etc?

You shouldn't be getting any of those 'speckles' and yellowish bends unless you're using some fancy setting for the bake, but you already mentioned using Scan and 2.5 Stars, so I'm out of ideas

Butthair

Under Preferences > Rendering Tab, in the output dithering section, make sure both checkboxes are on - True Color and Paletted.

Ott

Your material isn't properly setup. Bump > Normal Bump > Plug in your image. I'd bet you have your normal map plugged straight into your Bump slot, instead of it being setup properly as a normal bump.

HTLu

Butthair wrote: »

Under Preferences > Rendering Tab, in the output dithering section, make sure both checkboxes are on - True Color and Paletted.

Thanks, I just checked now and yes both True Color and Paletted are on.

HTLu

Thanks everyone for the awesome tips! I really could use all these for future references when I run into baking issues.

I found the problem was also in how I plugged in the normals map too.

HTLu

Ott wrote: »

Your material isn't properly setup. Bump > Normal Bump > Plug in your image. I'd bet you have your normal map plugged straight into your Bump slot, instead of it being setup properly as a normal bump.

Thank you, I think that fixed it.