I've been having a hard time trying to to bake out decent normals and find myself fighting the smoothing groups all the time. For the most part I have set the smoothing group to 1 for the low poly then adjusted it in areas that have bad smoothing. I did have a look at splitting the UV islands and assigning various smoothing groups to them but I kept getting smoothing seams along the UV seams. I think I'm going to have to revisit the bake to fix the normals as there are a lot of artefacts on glancing angles.
High Poly (3ds max) Low Poly (smoothing) Marmoset 2 Marmoset 2 Normal Bake UV Islands
Pretty good model so far! Like the shapes For the bake, it looks like you have uv islands with too extreme of a shading angle ( ~ 90 degrees). If you compare the messy looking normal pieces to the cleans, you'll see that the cleaner ones most likely are smoothed at a very small angle, if any. For the parts right below the cylinder, try to create a seam where they meet at the 90 degree angle, and it should clean it up. I added an image where the seams could be placed to fix the weird shading errors.
Try downloading the TexTools plug-in since it has a very useful tool that automatically assigns all uv islands into their own smoothing groups. Saves time and headaches. I hope that helps, feel free to ask any questions if I didn't do a great job clearing that up hah.
Are you baking with a cage? Break up your smoothing groups and UV islands and then bake with a cage that's all on one smoothing group. I find that usually gives me really good normal-maps with perfect seams.
More progress on the engraving. Almost there! I need to revisit the trigger casing and the small part of the mechanism below the barrel as the scale seems to be off. I also need to fix normals on the chamber and add an engrave pattern to that. I'm thinking of either adding some sort of ship or following the floral theme.
Replies
I've been having a hard time trying to to bake out decent normals and find myself fighting the smoothing groups all the time. For the most part I have set the smoothing group to 1 for the low poly then adjusted it in areas that have bad smoothing. I did have a look at splitting the UV islands and assigning various smoothing groups to them but I kept getting smoothing seams along the UV seams. I think I'm going to have to revisit the bake to fix the normals as there are a lot of artefacts on glancing angles.
High Poly (3ds max)
Low Poly (smoothing)
Marmoset 2
Marmoset 2
Normal Bake
UV Islands
Pretty good model so far! Like the shapes
Try downloading the TexTools plug-in since it has a very useful tool that automatically assigns all uv islands into their own smoothing groups. Saves time and headaches. I hope that helps, feel free to ask any questions if I didn't do a great job clearing that up hah.
Keep at it!
I did some research into normal mapping, Hard UV's and cages and had another try
Here's the result. My only concern hard UV's are the seams and how they will attract dirt and scratches in Quixel.
I've noticed that I need to change the nDo settings to groove instead of inset so that the engraving is the same level as the rest of the surface.
More progress on the engraving. Almost there! I need to revisit the trigger casing and the small part of the mechanism below the barrel as the scale seems to be off. I also need to fix normals on the chamber and add an engrave pattern to that. I'm thinking of either adding some sort of ship or following the floral theme.
https://www.artstation.com/artwork/4EZOl