Aliasing problem when baking normal maps

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi Everyone -

I am having some trouble trying to bake normals for a wall I am using in a game. I have been using this technique for the ceiling and floors (which are basically series of planes or a plane with one inset face). For the walls, I have created a low poly version with some basic geometry:

lowpoly.png927×905 32.5 KB

And a high poly with added details:

highpoly.png927×904 21.5 KB

To bake these in blender I unwrapped the low poly version and added a uv texture, for my bake settings I have normal map selected and am using a distance of 400 and a bias of 1.

I have attached the baked out results. Basically no matter what I do to the distance and bias I am still getting some artifacts (like the vertical lines not being perfectly straight) and some details are not clear at all (like the bolts). The uv texture is 2048x2048.

closeupuv1.png981×905 20.2 KB

I am wondering, should I split it up to get the details to show up better? I guess the main difference between this wall and the ceiling/floor textures is the size but it isn’t that large. Maybe it is a simple setting issue or something :slight_smile:

Thank you for your help/time!

2

Do you perhaps have un-applied object-mode rotation and/or scaling?

3

Thanks Sabba for the reply. I didn’t have object-mode scaling but I did have a rotation by 90 degrees on the Z axis. I applied it and retried the normal mapping and it still seems to have the same issues :frowning:

4

I have been testing it more and it appears to only happen with those diagonal lines, not sure if it has something to do with that? Thanks for any tips you can give!

5

I think I figured it out! The part I zoomed in on the normal map with the diagonals was one single plane in the low poly. I ended up adding a couple of edge loops to that one plane and unwrapped so each plane had more UV space once unwrapped. After baking the high poly to the new split up low poly I was able to incorporate a lot more detail! I guess that is needed if you are trying to get some small details into certain areas, but you could leave broader areas with less vertices.