Having trouble in making normal maps

KingLudo · Jan 2019

Hey folks, so i've been having a problem while making my 3d models is with the normal map.

Honestly I have no clue how to make a good decent normal map every time i try to bake a normal map with my high poly and low poly, it always manage to do it incorrectly kinda sucks cause it's the only issue I have, if i can fix this, things will go smoother for me

any help on how to bake a good normal map is appreciated.

I have tried to do a correct normal baking but I only managed to do it right with a very basic model.

In this case, I am making a tavern with a lot of different objects and there are things that are still unclear about what I should do.
So here is my low poly mesh

And the other picture below is my high poly

Might be hard to notice, but i added some minor details on the tavern, on my highpoly that I used zbrush from it (imported it the lowpoly from blender initially)

The UV Map kinda looks messy because there are a lot of objects in this mesh (like 30 or so)

I'll show it in a moment

After that I export the High Poly as a tool on zbrush (idk if that's the correct way to export it? still fairly new to zbrush) and I used xnormals to make my normal map.

Normal map below:

Image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/274141859876438018/538943171351019520/unknown.png

So here is my normal map, its very messy.

Im not sure at this point if its better if I have separate uv maps for each objects (is that possible?) and how do I fix it?

Im pretty confused at this point, I really dont know where to go from there. Any help would be very much appreciated!

throttlekitty · Jan 2019

hoo boy. So, there's nothing truly wrong with working this way, it can be nice if you plan on unique details for every single part of your model, but you're very limited by texture resolution if using a single texture. It's more common to break the house down into modular pieces to make better use of texture space, and use vertex paint/mask to mix in additional textures for uniqueness.

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Modular_environments

There's a number of threads here on polycount too to help give you some ideas, if you search for Modular and skim through a few.

Anyway, the normal map is likely fine, what does it look like on the low poly? I think what you're seeing as messiness is the edge padding, which you need to be there for a good bake. And yes it is possible to use multiple textures, but I don't use Blender, so I couldn't tell you the best way to go about handling the UVs there.

Having trouble in making normal maps

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