^ Yes, depending on your pipeline you might have to break more shells for a cleanly baked angular hard-surface model, but breaking smoothing along your EXISTING shells is already beneficial, no matter what type of model.
Make sure to use 'Bitflag Smoothing Groups', this is what works fine other apps as well. You can also uncheck smg and just 'Include Normals' which will export hard edges via split vertex normals.
Of interest to most who will read this thread, I wrote an extensive tutorial that covers this topic and many other common baking issues. It's geared towards baking in Toolbag, but most of the Basics and Best Results sections apply universally. Check it out on the Marmoset site:…
I did a rebake after separating the UV islands and below is the result: It seems a little bit better but I'm still getting some hard edges. Are those unavoidable or there's still some tweaking I have to do for a truly seamless bake?
I think I agree with joopson, your high poly mesh looks rather soft. Having hard edges on a low poly from a soft high poly mesh won't looks right (the way it does on your foreground cube)
Thanks so much for this info. I'll keep on going with my current workflow then:) Sounds like its gonna be easier to do max projection bakes and if the quality isn't better in xnormal I'll skip it for hard surface stuff. Thanks again.
hey so when using "Averaged projection mesh" workflow .. (hard edges on uv seams + a cage.) in fbx settings should i have any particular options disabled/enabled... notably: smoothing groups and binomials and tangents? i will be baking in xnormal.
Yes, non-negotiable. If you use average normals you will overide the lowpoly mesh normals and get errors when you apply the nm to your mesh. No, you don't have any restrictions on your lowpoly, this is why its important to use a cage. If you don't use a cage, hard edges on your lowpoly will result in seam errors in the…
Ok, so, I really need to know if I comprehend this correctly because I'm absorbing a lot of information that clashes with my pre-conceived notions. If I want 100 percent no tears normal maps drawn up by Xnormal I need to : 1: Use a cage for anything more complex than a single UV Island/Single smoothing group mesh. (Using a…
I remember having issues with Crysis 2's tangent basis, although perhaps the latest CE3 SDK is synced with the qualified Max normals, thanks for the info Racer445. Either way, if the xNormal plugin works with the latest version, I think i'll have to try that out. I've been avoiding xNormal, perhaps it's time to start using…