xNormal Baking Problems
polycounter lvl 5
Hi Guys,
So I found this sweet tutorial on baking, somewhere on the Polycount Wiki. I have been practising and trying to understand everything there is to baking due to how popular it is for game artists.
I am running in to some problems. I am following this tutorial to a T but whenever I bake in xNormal I get nothing showing on my normal map after the bake is completed.
Here is some screens:
My test models. There is the high poly, low poly and a cage.
Here are the models all zeroed out and history is deleted.
Here is my low poly's UV's.
Here is the results from xNormal after I put my high and low poly and external cage file in there.
Here are the baking settings. I have tangent space normal ticked and no swizzling, all the normal map options are default.
I don't know where I am going wrong. I have put the default scale of meshes in xNormal to 2.0000 because I kept getting a message before baking telling me if the results aren't good to scale up the models.
Any help is appreciated, this is a workflow I am trying to learn to improve my modelling skills and get a good understanding of how to bake normal maps.
Cheers guys
Dave.
So I found this sweet tutorial on baking, somewhere on the Polycount Wiki. I have been practising and trying to understand everything there is to baking due to how popular it is for game artists.
I am running in to some problems. I am following this tutorial to a T but whenever I bake in xNormal I get nothing showing on my normal map after the bake is completed.
Here is some screens:
My test models. There is the high poly, low poly and a cage.
Here are the models all zeroed out and history is deleted.
Here is my low poly's UV's.
Here is the results from xNormal after I put my high and low poly and external cage file in there.
Here are the baking settings. I have tangent space normal ticked and no swizzling, all the normal map options are default.
I don't know where I am going wrong. I have put the default scale of meshes in xNormal to 2.0000 because I kept getting a message before baking telling me if the results aren't good to scale up the models.
Any help is appreciated, this is a workflow I am trying to learn to improve my modelling skills and get a good understanding of how to bake normal maps.
Cheers guys
Dave.
Replies
Additionally, make sure you are actually subdividing your mesh before exporting, not just exporting the smooth preview. It could be you are getting no normal info in your bake because there is literally no difference between your LP and HP.
Here are the models in xNormal 3D Viewer.
Here is the high poly in Maya LT.
The models I exported as .OBJ with their normals and the option on the high poly and low poly is selected as 'Use exported normals'. I bake and get the same results
Those black borders look horrible, as far as I am aware they aren't gaps. I heard that baking hard surface stuff if you have harsh angles on your low poly it is best to split the UV's in to their own shells, the UV's are in my above post if that helps
The results above aren't very nice, there has been no change to my UV's, I have changed the cage though to fit the low poly as close as I can.
Try beveling the edges down on the lowpoly.
Here is the results after adding a bevel of 2 divisions on all the edges of the cube.
Here is the tutorial if anyone is wondering what I am watching. I still haven't got very good results, I'm gonna keep on playing around with it and probably try it out on a more complex model as a cube may be a bad example.
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If it still doesn't look quite right, you may have to change the tangent-space coordinate system to "Left Handed", instead of the default "Right Handed". But that'll only help if your normals were baked to be X+ Y- Z+, which isn't xnormal's default.
The results!
Very happy thanks for all the help guys, I think I have a fairly good understanding of baking now and what to look out for to get a perfect bake. Gonna start working on some high and low poly stuff XD