I’m now tackling the one thing that’s keeping me from considering myself a semi-competent intermediately skilled 3D modeler: baking normals. I’ve never been able to do it successfully in the past, and I’m having trouble with it now.
My problems are, of course, the seams. I’ve managed to make things look pretty decent, but I’ve still got a few issues to contend with. Instead of explaining it, I’ll show it to you in a number of pictures.
…which looks pretty close to good. It’d be about perfect if it weren’t for those end caps.
I’ve tried a number of different things in my attempt to get some smooth shading across my stones, even going so far as to bake each stone individually to see if it’s a bounce issue. It’s not. The only thing I might try doing now is boosting the padding a bit (which I’m gonna try next), but I’m not exactly hopeful.
The only thing I can figure is that it’s an issue with how I unwrap. Thing is, how else can I unwrap these things? No matter how I do it, I’m gonna have to have a seam in there, and the seams are what are giving me problems. I could fudge things, and replace my seams so it’s hidden a little better, but that’s cheesy. I’d rather learn how to do smooth normals.
…so what am I doing wrong?
edit: And adding some extra padding didn’t fix things. I went up to 10px margins, and I’m still getting the same errors.
Why is it that I always seem to run into these problems that no one can answer?
Because everybody thinks texture baking is magic, doesn’t learn to do it correctly, and blames the tool if it fails.
Separate each brick’s major planes completely. You want 6 islands. As it is now, the bake is resulting in overlapping ray hits causing weird edges. This is also a problem caused by your low poly being too different from the high poly around the beveled edges.
Generally, any angle greater than 35 degress should be split or adjusted to better match the high poly.
I also found this, which looks to be a solid primer on the use of cages and blockers in XNormal. I’ll finish this, read through the Polycount tutorials above, and see what I can get.
I’ve done some reading, done even more experimenting, and I now have a decently basic idea of how to cut my UVs for normalmap baking. It makes sense, since the baking process treats seams as if they were sharp smoothing edges, so you want to cut your UVs at harsh angles to get the best results.
Well, I’ve come close a couple of times, but I always seem to have a few shading errors to contend with. I think my biggest problem is that I’m trying to bake something that’s mostly smooth angles, so I don’t have a clear place to make cuts.
I’m going to keep up the reading and experimenting, but, of course, if anyone has any tips or pointers, I’m all ears.
edit: Okay, well I’m dumb.
Make sure you set your Color Space to Non-Color on the image node, people.
Did that, normals are now perfect. Looks great. Sometimes you miss the forest for the trees and all that.
Still, I learned a bunch, so all in all, it was a positive experience.
