Ok! So, if I understand correctly. 1: If I use a cage mesh in Xnormal (a cage mesh which I import from Maya where I define it by hand), it overrides or makes irrelevant the smooth normals setting. 2: The cage mesh should be set to all soft/averaged edges regardless of the low-poly. 3: The low-polys hard edges should be…
I think for character work the benefits are less, and generally speaking for soft organics I wouldn't really bother. If you've got LODs sometimes the seams can worse if you harden the seam edge on a cylinder, so for something like the seam on an arm I wouldn't do it(though you won't get a visible hard edge in game, dunno…
Your lowpoly should be the exact size as your high poly, not larger. Triangulate before you bake. Set your hard edges to your UV islands. Use as few UV islands as possible, the entire left and right side of this object could each be 1 uv island for example.
Make your high poly wayyyy smoother. A cube might not be the best test mesh because of its simple UV's.. currently what you've got is all hard edges on the low, so each face of the cube will be 1 uv island, since there is no benefit to stitching them (performance wise, texturing might be a different story). This setup is…
Well, tried it with only the bitflag and include normals options, seams still prevail unfortunately. Maybe I just set up the cage wrong or it is an option in Xnormal but seriously how hard can it be to get correct bakes on such simple object. If someone wants to try here is the http://www.pasteall.org/blend/24886
Yeah, I understand that. If only I could find a quicker way of converting all of the UV seams to hard edges... It doesn't, unfortunately. Unreal splits and alters the direction of the normals along the UV seam no matter what. Just out of curiosity would still be interesting to know why the Engine does that :)
I baked a normal map for my hard surface model and I got pretty good results without major problems. I'm somewhat happy with my results. I triangulated my LP and CAGE models before baking them in xNormal. When I applied the normal map for my original quad version of the model just for the sake of testing, some odd shadings…
Awesome read, EQ. Thanks for sharing, I learnt a great deal. I've basically been using soft edges all over the mesh and surface normals for baking, which usually results in a good bake but has its obvious drawbacks like you mentioned here. I'll start using hard edges more often now that I know the technical workings behind…
Great article/read EQ...I was wondering if you could clear up a few things for me??? 1)I think I might have the terminology wrong...are UV splits and UV borders the same thing? 2)Are edges considered hard because its on a 90 degree bend or because the edge is between 2 separate smoothing groups? 3)Is this what you were…
So there are times when you have to sacrifice vertex points for a clean bake when working with hard surfaces where the normal effects an edge? Am I correct? I'm sure there are exceptions where baking where a seam will result doesn't matter if you can't see it, but generally there is no other way to go about a clean bake at…