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Small Red Dot, artifacts, when baking normal map.

I got a problem when baking my normal maps, I got small red dots that I can't get rid of.
I have discover that small object can cause this, but now I really don't know how to fix the remaining dots.
My cage don't cross these areas so I don't know what to do.
Someone got an idea?

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  • Joshua Stubbles
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    Joshua Stubbles polycounter lvl 19
    You're using 3dsmax I take it?
    The red color is where you're getting failed ray casts. So your cage must be wrong there. Turn shading on the cage, then try moving the cage verts around that area, see if the shading reveals any punctures in the faces. If that fails, try using using the distance casting, instead of the cage. And if that fails, try using xNormal. It can often produce better results than 3dsmax, even though it uses the same methods.
  • jogshy
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    jogshy polycounter lvl 17
    [ QUOTE ]
    I got a problem when baking my normal maps, I got small red dots that I can't get rid of.
    I have discover that small object can cause this, but now I really don't know how to fix the remaining dots.
    My cage don't cross these areas so I don't know what to do.
    Someone got an idea?

    [/ QUOTE ]
    3dsmax can act stangely sometimes... Some advices:

    1) Sure the object you are baking is seen completely on the viewport. Don't know why but sometimes if the object is clipped by the viewport stange points appear over the baked texture.

    2) Disable the SSE option if you are using the default scanline renderer ( in case you use MentalRay I think that option is not present ). SSE is a special SIMD CPU instruction-set used by some microprocesors(like the Pentium3/4, AthlonXP,etc ) which is sightly faster than the 8087-set but less precise. Less precision means the ray test can fail(marked in red in the output texture) due to innacuracy around triangle edges or very perpendicular rays.

    3) Try to scale up/down your objects... If they are too small/too large some floating point numerical problems can appear. An object with a radius less than 0.001 can be problematic. Same for 100000000 or more.

    4) Try to triangulate(Edit Mesh) + collapse modifier stack + XForm your mesh. Then reapply the projection modifier and retry the bake process.

    5) If the problem persist and you cannot discover what is
    happening then try with other program... sometimes to change can tell you what's the problem. For a fast test you can use xNormal, NVIDIA Melody, etc

    Hope it helps blush.gif
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