Cycles normal map issues - WHY oh WHY?

Support Materials and Textures
1

Normal maps in Cycles seem to give me this effect consistently: [ATTACH=CONFIG]206459[/ATTACH]

see around the ear - a very distinct rim where the seams were, though the normal map was baked in Blender directly from a sculpt with a fairly large pixel margin. to compare, here’s the same texture in a quick Octane render:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]206460[/ATTACH]

and quick one in Yafaray 0.1.2:

[ATTACH=CONFIG]206461[/ATTACH]

there may be a very faint visible seam there in the other two renders, but nothing so show-stopping as in Cycles. am i the only one experiencing this? i’m very curious to know. i get artifacts like this often with the normal map node, even in textures that were painted “seamlessly” (pun intended) in other apps, or baked in Blender.

am i ‘often’ doing something incorrect then? or is it still a little buggy? i don’t wanna render in Yafaray or Octane. i wanna render in Cycles. pout. :frowning: i’ve been using trunk builds i compile myself on Mint 13. am going to test in the latest 2.65 official release in a minute…

EDIT: yep, same problem in official 2.65 build.

2

wow. time for some humble pie. i guess i do ‘often’ do something wrong - what i must ‘often’ forget to do is recalculate normals before baking, on both the low poly mesh AND the sculpt. it was baking normals in differing directions. earlier today, i’d rebaked the texture several times, and actually made very sure to do this, but then when rebaking i left the “Clear” images check box unchecked, so it must not have baked a new image. so i shot myself in the foot - a whole day of troubleshooting… tried it again with “Clear” checked this time, and it baked an entirely new image, with correct normals.

lesson learned!