Ugly Normal and AO Bakes

blinKX10 · Aug 2013

So for class I am texturing a T-34 that I have modeled on my own time.
I have a low poly model that is at ~6000 polygons and the high is at ~300k polygons.

So I brought them both into Maya 2013 and used the Transfer Maps plugin after setting all the envelope settings and stuff. What came out was this abomination

Can someone help? I need to have all my texture maps finished for Tuesday.

Laze · Aug 2013

Try using xnormal to bake your maps instead, if you get the same results it could be thar the normals on the actual model are facing the wrong way.

BARDLER · Aug 2013

Could you post this stuff in your scene so we can see it with the high, low, and cage?

General stuff to look out for and hopefully fix the issue.
Make sure your cage, envelop in Maya, is encompassing your entire high and low poly models.
Use an exploded bake setup. When you bake with intersecting meshes it will pick up other pieces in UV shells you dont want it to. If you separate everything out and then bake you will get way cleaner results.
This probably isn't related to your issue but use xNormal. Its a million times faster and much better than Maya transfer maps.

blinKX10 · Aug 2013

Laze wrote: »

Try using xnormal to bake your maps instead, if you get the same results it could be thar the normals on the actual model are facing the wrong way.

I have tried, but either it takes forever to analyze the high poly or the program just isn't working when I try using it

blinKX10 · Aug 2013

BARDLER wrote: »

Could you post this stuff in your scene so we can see it with the high, low, and cage?

General stuff to look out for and hopefully fix the issue.
Make sure your cage, envelop in Maya, is encompassing your entire high and low poly models.
Use an exploded bake setup. When you bake with intersecting meshes it will pick up other pieces in UV shells you dont want it to. If you separate everything out and then bake you will get way cleaner results.
This probably isn't related to your issue but use xNormal. Its a million times faster and much better than Maya transfer maps.

I have made sure it covers the whole model, I will try Xnormal again tonight and get some screen grabs to show you guys tomorrow

Sinking · Aug 2013

Hey, if you are using xNormal and can't get the models to work, try exporting the highpoly as Obj, instead (of Fbx). Apparently xNormal'S inbuild trianguilator can mess up your models, causing them to have t-shapes and what not. I think you can disable it, too, but overall I got the best results with Obj for the highpoly (even though they are bigger files than fbx).

Also, check your geometry and normal map options in the exporter. It may well be that the highpoly is too small (since the objects "shrink" a little when you are smoothing). You may have to stabilize the HP a bit more before smoothing, so it keeps the shape better.

Another thing that comes to mind is the size of the cage. It seems like it is projecting fine on some parts and badly on others. So you might try making a custom cage and bae in Xnormal, see if that works. It looks like there are parts projecting on top of each other/intersecting, so it could be a cage issue.

If nothing helps, I tend to export the pieces that have issuues separately and bake them one at a time. With the layer set to "overlay" in Photoshop you can stack them and build a final normal map. (This is kinda the noob version of the "explosion setup" pro modelers are talking about ^^)

These were just some ideas of the top of my head. Hope something works for you.

Logithx · Aug 2013

Those normal map artifacts remind me of a problem in 3ds Max where if the base mesh of the high poly is perfectly overlapped with the low poly it results in all sorts of problems on the render. For this I use a 'push' modifier to increase the size of the low poly by an extremely small amount so that the verts of the low and high poly no longer overlap perfectly.

Not sure if this is what is causing your problems, it might be related to your cage.

Eric Chadwick · Aug 2013

As mentioned, exploded bake will solve most of the problems.

Also the overlapping issue Logithx mentioned, I've only see that happen when baking AO with mental ray in 3ds Max. Other baking methods don't have this problem.

blinKX10 · Aug 2013

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

As mentioned, exploded bake will solve most of the problems.

Also the overlapping issue Logithx mentioned, I've only see that happen when baking AO with mental ray in 3ds Max. Other baking methods don't have this problem.

I assume then I will have to somehow separate my high poly too?

blinKX10 · Aug 2013

Here are some screen grabs that I took just a few seconds ago.

I tried making my low poly slightly smaller so that they weren't occupying the same space

Here is my Envelope

Here are all my bake settings

I have tried XNormal but for some reason it cant get past analyzing the high poly, forcing me to use Maya to bake. So I'm still waiting for the results, hopefully these work out at least half decently

Rageleet · Aug 2013

as already mentioned try exploding your bake that's your best shot for getting a clean nice bake heres a tutorial here

, u might want to adjust some of your low poly so it fits the HP's silhouette as close as possible while trying it.

As for your Xnormal problem im not sure why its taking forever to Analise thats really weird. Try exporting the Xnormal File type SBM, as to me it might be incorrect settings for the OBJ file or file being used although im not sure on this

.

Did a quick google search and it could because of N-gons, so more than 4 sided shapes, heres the link.

Best of luck.

cptSwing · Aug 2013

You should really revert your lowpoly-resize. Try and have both hi/low occupy the same space (as close as possible).

Ugly Normal and AO Bakes

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