I am fuzzy on how UV generator handles corner. Here is my UV test; I created hump around the corner of a cube. Rendered image is a simple cube with UV map attached. The corners are clearly visible on UV meshed cube. Although high poly mesh was totally round.
How do you make UV to map properly around the corner / seam. Do high poly mesh object need to wrap over the corner?
I don’t think this is anything to do with the UV unwrap. Make sure both baking and rendering are done with your low-poly mesh set smooth. Also check that you are applying the normals to the low-poly mesh at full strength; for some reason the default ‘Nor’ value is 0.5, but with a genuine normal map the only sensible choice is 1.0.
Best wishes,
Matthew
>Make sure both baking and rendering are done with your low-poly mesh set smooth.
Ya that was it! I didn’t smooth the low poly mesh. After all what’s the point right? I thought smoothing had to do with render, how reflection is treated between polys, and not actually increasing the number of polys.
You are right that smoothing doesn’t increase the number of polys, and it is a little counterintuitive that you should use it in this case. The point is that if you bake a normal map wrt the unsmoothed surface, there will always be a sudden change in the normal map at the poly edges; the finite pixel resolution of the map then leads to shading artifacts along the edge (as you saw). If you bake wrt the smoothed surface the map will change smoothly even where the low-poly mesh has a sharp edge, so pixelation is much less of a problem.
Best wishes,
Matthew
