xnormal bakes highlights edges
node
Hello,
I have been trying to bake some high poly rock normals onto low poly version of themselves using xnormal, but whatever I do the normal map ends up making edges more visible than they should be, here's an exemple in UE4.
It does the same thing in blender.
Those are not Uv seams as there is no uv cut there. I've looked at a lot of forum but I can't find anything. I've tried baking with a cage (did close to nothing), making the low poly entirely smooth and baking (which didn't work at all), scaling the mesh by a lot. Nothing does it.
It does the same thing on my other bakes.
I've tried baking it with blender same result.
Here's how most of my bake result look
If someone knows what does this please tell me, I am completly lost.
Thank you
.
I have been trying to bake some high poly rock normals onto low poly version of themselves using xnormal, but whatever I do the normal map ends up making edges more visible than they should be, here's an exemple in UE4.
It does the same thing in blender.
Those are not Uv seams as there is no uv cut there. I've looked at a lot of forum but I can't find anything. I've tried baking with a cage (did close to nothing), making the low poly entirely smooth and baking (which didn't work at all), scaling the mesh by a lot. Nothing does it.
It does the same thing on my other bakes.
I've tried baking it with blender same result.
Here's how most of my bake result look
If someone knows what does this please tell me, I am completly lost.
Thank you
.
Replies
This how it looked if it bake with the low poly set as smooth, I tried doing the same on a more complex mesh and it looked even worse.
The mesh you bake to and the mesh you apply the map to must have identical normals so ensure they're being treated the same in every tool
Ue4 can override normals at import, most bakers can override normals at bake time and your modelling package can produce total garbage and have the mesh look fine. One of those things is likely causing the problem - which one I couldn't say
In blender is the difference between hard and soft normal just the soft and flat button in object mode? I don't know too much about those things. How do I make sure I have identical normals ?
edit : Baking with both set to smooth gave this result
so still didn't work I feel completly lost
Double edit, I tried this normal map in blender and it looked right, which I think, means it's your last theory of UE4 making it look like trash, what provokes this ? (I obviously already inverted the green channel)
triple edit : I finally found how to do it, since I realized the bake with smooth low poly and hard high poly worked. It made me realized I also need the smoothed model to be imported in ue4 and not the hard one, so the 2 combined together worked.
What matters is that within one uv shell on the lowpoly you need that entire shell to be in one smoothing group, or soft edges.
The lowpoly you export to engine needs to be exactly the same you baked to, as tangent space normals basically only are the difference between the lowpoly and the highpoly's normals per pixel.
In engine, reflections per texel will be [lowpoly's vertex normals] + [normalmap] = [highpoly estimation].
It stands to reason that if you display the normals on a different model or change the normal map, the result won't match your highpoly.