Normal Maps Look Strange
Hello,
I'm new to UV unwrapping and I've been having some problems using Marmoset Toolbag 3. I'm creating a game-ready asset of a SP2022 handgun. I've completed the high-poly model in ZBrush, the low-poly model in Maya, and am onto baking in Marmoset Toolbag 3.
At a first glance I was pretty happy with the result, but when I zoomed in there were a lot of issues. Here is the whole baked model:
Here you can see how low quality the bake is and some weird artifacts on a hard edge.
Here are some more even weirder details and problems.
Here is the normal map. Even though I'm rendering at 2K resolution the normal map seems very pixelated and odd. This weird ballooning effect is everywhere. I only baked the normal maps.
These are the settings that I used.
Also, when I try to import my meshes Marmoset gives me this notice. The high-poly mesh has a poly count of 24 million. I decimated each mesh so I can work with it but didn't want to go too far to mess anything up.
Does anyone know how to improve the quality of my bake and can shed some light on what this error notice is?
Thank you,
Ethan Richards
Replies
For the issue with the hard edges, it looks like you've set up hard edges but do not have splits in your UV map. You'll need to soften those edges or split up the UVs so the hard edge regions are isolated. See the Best results -> Hard Edges and UVs section here: https://marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/#bestresults
In other spots, it looks like there may be areas that are missing the high poly. Make sure to adjust the cage offset so that the cage entirely covers the high poly mesh. See the Baking Basic section of the tutorial.
As to pixelation, if you want more texture detail you're going to need to increase the texture resolution, map your UV layout more efficiently to better use the space, or both.
For the ballooning effect, I believe you're referring to the UV padding. This is added to ensure that the textures mip-map well in game engines. You can disable padding in the baker object properties, but that is not generally recommended.
For the error prompt, it looks like Toolbag can not find an image file when loading your 3D model. This may be an issue with the material that was exported from your 3D app. You could try removing this image from the material. You can also select no to ignore this error.
Thank you for the advice. I think everything you mention I have solved now except for the texture resolution. I tried increasing the texture resolution but that still hasn't worked. I want to try to use multiple UV tiles to give each shell more space, but I don't know how to do that in Marmoset Toolbag 3. Is this a good idea and do you know how to do it?
Thanks again.
A couple other things to try re: pixelation
As far as using multiple UV tiles, you could try this, but I'm not sure it would help. 4x 2048x2048 textures give you the same amount of resolution as 1x 4096x4096. So if 4K isn't enough resolution, you would need to increase significantly, to say 4x8K or 8x8K. Those are very large textures for an asset like this if you're trying to make a game asset. Another thing you may need to consider is the viewing distance, if you're zooming in very far, that's not how the asset would likely be seen in a game, so you shouldn't worry so much about whether you can see pixelation.
In any case, to set up multiple UV tiles, you would need to lay out each tile or UV set so it fills up the 0-1 UV area. Then for that set, give it a unique material. When you import it into Toolbag, you can enable "Multiple Texture Sets" in the baker object. For each unique material on the low poly mesh, it will render out a new set of texture maps.
Generally, a gun like this wouldn't use multiple texture sets unless it had accessories, like a silencer, scope, etc, that were configurable in the game. In that case, it's good to use additional, smaller texture sets for optional accessories, so those can be swapped in and out of memory as needed.
Something that I did to increase the resolution was increase formatting from 8 Bits/Channel to 32 Bits/Channel which helped a lot, but not completely. It is fine for the most part now, but when you look closely you can still see pixilation. I'm fairly certain my UV's are made correctly so I don't know what I could be doing wrong.
Nevertheless, thank you for the help and advice.
Are you sure you're seeing pixelization, and not the polygons out of zbrush?
By default zbrush exports with hard edges.
I can't think of any valid reason you'd have visible pixels at the resolutions you're baking, at a reasonable distance from the model.
Can you post a screenshot of this pixelization?