Okay cheers guys. Clears things up, seems like I've learnt more and more to normal maps in the past year, for example UV splits was another thing I never knew about. Hopefully there won't be any more surprises.
Spread them around a bit, in the UVs. Because even if technically they're all separate islands, they still look like they're all sewn together, and so they produce the same issue. Just put some space between each UV island.
Here is the uv for an object. Someone help me get it into shape or lead me in a direction after various failed attempts! This is after planar then cut and unfold. looks like a stomach and would rather it have more of a uniform checker pattern. Thank you.
how to deal when you have hi poly bevel intersect like in the image: I bake one with no bevel but the result show dark the second with a bevel which gives me a better result. just wondering is this the way to handle it ? or is there a better way?
it seems this may be the problem - http://community.thefoundry.co.uk/discussion/topic.aspx?f=83&t=87255 But world space normals behave unpredictably for me too. Like all technical issues I'll figure it out someday but I don't have time right now.
What would be your recommendation on splits with LODs (bevels on edge or thin rings like around the brim of a hat)? It's extremely easy to ruin a good bake with a single collapse of those, but having a separate UV island/SG to support it doesn't seem efficient in the slightest.
@RashedAlmetrami why aren't you using a single 8192x4096 texture to avoid the problem entirely? If you bake with a proper cage you shouldn't get a noticable seam on your normal maps. Those seams there look to me like you have cage issues.
I think it's silly to think of it as "hard edge vs 1 smoothing group" like these are the only options or that 1 smoothing group means anything at all in the first place. Think about it in terms of how extreme the mesh normals are instead. The more extreme the mesh normals are, the stronger the gradients will be in the…
Nope, Softimage but the process of building the cage is the same in all applications. The push operator does nothing more then moving all the vertices along their corresponding surface normals, so selecting all of them and moving them along their normal does the same like a push operator.
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…