I have been dealing with this huge mesh for days and this is my last resource. I modeled a shotgun for my game project, I made it very low poly. Then I decided to add some details, holes and such. I used the Bool Tool addon and then remade the faces so I would have only tris and quads and no n-gons. I also created additional meshes like rectangles to make protuberances.
Since I wanted more details I duplicated my low poly and created more detail using the bool tool and adding more meshes, this copy was my high poly.
So my high poly was not so high compared to the low poly but since I didn’t want to mess with all the bad topology I wanted to make a normal map. I did what I know and have been taught, I placed the low poly and high poly in the same place, same origin, and made a cage from the low poly.
My normal map looks horrible and to be honest I don’t know what the problem is, I have tried with a cage, without a cage and breaking down the object to bake the normal for every part, nothing works.
QUESTIONS:
What have I done wrong in my workflow to get a normal map that doesn’t register the high poly details properly? (check image)
Is my approach for creating those carvings, holes and other details correct? should I do hard surface modeling in another way?
Adjust the cage distance or offset in the bake settings. It looks like its clipped, extending the value will ensure the topology is fully covered in the bake.
Alternative is to use a custom cage (only works in cycles baking)
the biggest problem I can see, is that the details you are trying to bake don’t really produce a good vector output.
As the cuts are perpendicular to the baking surface, the area they will occupy will be nothing…
I not completely sure if I follow with the custom shape for the cage, I copied my low poly and scaled it using Alt+S in edit mode. Do you think you could point me to a tutorial if there is something that could improve my workflow?
Thanks, I finally got detail in those parts of the map, they were indeed 90° angles and the baking didn’t register anything. I have been checking all those amazing normal maps people have in Sketchfab. I still got a lot of work to clean in photoshop, I really want to get to the level I’ve seen in Sketchfab, am I missing something important? I know it is a really vague question but since I know the basics of baking in cycles and using a cage (a basic one) which could be the next step to get better results? Keywords would be enough to start to investigate
