Baked normal map seemingly jagged and low quality

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hey gang,

I’ve run into a bit of an issue here. I have a mesh that I’ve sculpted some detail on with the multires modifier, and I’m trying to bake these details down into a normal map that could be applied to the lower resolution mesh.

I’ve run the gambit and tried a few things, but my results are constantly somewhat jagged and low quality in certain areas. For example in the images provided, you can tell that the eyes and mouth of the unwrapped mesh have a jagged, low-poly quality to them, and I cannot quite figure out why.

Image 1
Image 2

Anyone have any ideas? I can provide a .blend if necessary.

Thanks!

2

Have you applied it to your low-poly mesh to see the final result? My guess is it will look right. The angles you’re seeing in what were supposed to be spheres are there to balance out the actual angle-ness of the low-poly mesh, if that makes sense.

So my advice is to finish the process and see what it gives you.

3

Thanks for the response, I actually meant to include some render results in my original post but I got distracted.

This image is just the sculpted object being rendered at 4x multires. It was sculpted at 6x, but I run out of memory trying to render at that size.

This image is the baked normal map applied to a 3x subsurface as a normal map, not as a displacement or anything.

As you can tell, the sharp ridges persist around the eyes with the normal map.

4

Your bump map is far too strong there – dial back the settings until you don’t get those dark ridges under the eyes and post another screenshot. I’m still not convinced anything is fundamentally wrong with your process here. Any kind of high-poly to low-poly bake inevitably loses some detail of the original. How much is lost depends on how many (or how few!) faces you’re using on your low-poly surface.

It would also help if you hilight the area that concerns you the most. Is it the part where the mesh is going black? I think that’s just a bump map being applied with too much strength. Some of the apparent ridges in the baked UV image aren’t all that apparent in the render.

5

I was able to correct it by resculpting to remove some extreme inward artifacts that were making other details less visible without using a high strength value. Thanks for your help!