Here's a bake I just tried on the back of reading through this whole thread. This is very inspirational stuff! Enjoying learning more about the theory. I don't pretend to be able to follow all of what you guys say, but it's beginning to make some form of sense to me, and I really would like to become well versed in this…
Oh boy, well, first off I will tell you that I do not fully understand these terms. Generally these terms will have more relevance to graphics programers/shader programers than to your average artist, but if you're interested in the nuts and bolts math of the matter you can check out this:…
Gradients are due to the vertex normals being altered in some way. This means you have edges sharing the same SG instead of having a hard edge. Where the gradients show up on the normal map will directly correlate to where the vertex normals have been altered on the model. The more softened normals there are the more the…
First up, thanks for taking the time not just to write this awesome post but also for hanging around to answer the questions of us mere mortals. I've been battling the finer points of hard surface normal maps for years and years and, like you say, the amount of miss-information, general cluelessness and sometimes even lack…
Ok, so first things first. This is a test mesh I created to show off 3Point Shader quality mode. What that means is this mesh was created specifically for a synced normals workflow and to show off the benefits of that workflow, there isn't an excessive amount of uv seams, in fact there are less than I normally would use…
So the stretching occurs because as you can see those polygons are not perfectly square on your model. Therefore when you make them perfectly square on your UV layout it will stretch the texture. If you don't want stretching the most accurate layout would be closer to what you had before. To alleviate some of the…
Ty so much for the info. I used to do all my baking using the method A in the first post. Of course, hard surfaces came out fubar. Right now, I'm using the " C: Hard edges at uv seams, "Explicit mesh normals" projection" and my results are much better, but I cannot use the B: Hard edges at uv seams, "Averaged projection…
Even things that are square tend to have slightly rounded edges, little in life is really as sharp as a hardened edge in a 3d program would be, and objects generally look a little better if you exaggerate that softness. Now, if you just want to have completely hard edges here, you don't even need to bake a normal map for…
@ eq one quick comment - If i were to uv this, i wouldnt have put a seam where you did on smaller thinner edge of the haloscope, i'd have that welded to the main housing, which a single smooth group bake would allow me to do, this is better because when im painting edge wear on that edge, its 100x easier and faster to make…
Hello people of Polycount! I've been doing a lot of normal map baking recently, and this thread has improved my knowledge of the subject immensely.Thank you all so much for your contributions! I have a quick question/example that I wanted to get your opinions on... Here are a couple of windows I'm making for an exterior…