Why is my chin getting random levels of light assigned in large blocks? Am I supposed to leave the model’s shading to flat? If not, why are there lines appearing? How can I get the chin to stop having blocks of random and unrealistic shades? And if I can set an object’s shading to smooth, what else do I have to do to stop those lines from appearing?
If it’s possible, I’d also like to figure out how baking normal maps work. What calculations does Blender take to actually make a normal map? That way, I might be able to save 2 weeks of fooling around with normal maps the next time I run into this issue.
Maybe pack your images and share your file so that we can test? You need to make sure that your lowpoly is smoothed before baking (if it is supposed to be smooth), also make sure that the Image Texture is set to Non-Color instead of sRGB, that you use the good UV map, etc…
Also, I had already smoothed the low poly before baking, but ended up with the same results either way. As for the image texture, I already set it to Non-Color. That just cleared up some random patches of reflective skin, though, like from my last question. As for a good UV map, how do I make it good? All the parts seem to line up already.
Well, the thing is, when you retopologize, wither manually or automatically, it will make the UV map you’ve created earlier out of sync with the newly retopologized mesh.
So the easiest option to fix the problem is to rebake the Normal Maps.
And the Normal Map is basically a map showing the direction of each face in our mesh, but with RGB coordinate.
How do you get such uniform UV parts? Mine are all random. Also, rebaking just moved the funny bits to the arms and didn’t solve the issue with smoothing…
Well, I guess the big part is to make well placed seams on the model before you unwrap the mesh. However, you’d now notice that there are difference in your current UV map from the old one.
I don’t think you rebaked the Normal correctly though, because now it’s still a mismatch to the newly created UV map, and it shows a weird color. And for the brown blob on the arm, I don’t think it comes from the Normal Map. Do you use baked texture for the Base Color?
I can look around to see the real culprit. However, can you send a smaller file? Just copy the body mesh to a new Blend file and send it instead. The previous file is big because it contains everything else that we don’t really need to see.
How does one bake a normal then? I’m also pretty certain the brown blob is from the normal map. The only other image texture I used is just a peach background with some green lines for the veins on the other arm. The normal map’s image texture node is also set to non-color. At least, I think you’re talking about color space when you say “Base Color”. Either way, the last time I used color space, I ended up with reflectivity issues, not random blobs.
I think I see the problem. If I see it correctly, you have a sculpted and detailed version of this body mesh, and you’re creating your Normal Map from there? And now you want to import it to this simplified body mesh?
If these aren’t enough, you can always use the Google Drive file that I linked earlier in this topic. It has the sculpture and the low poly mesh in it. It might be very slightly off, but I can’t remember if I rescaled it at this point,
Okay, can you show me the UV map for the sculpture? Because it seems that the Normal Map you’re using (Lemod.Body.Normals) doesn’t look like it comes from a 5-millions-poly mesh.
Well, I guess that’s the culprit. You see, first of all, when we intend to work with baking Normal Map, or actually, anything else that has to do with Shading, we should first start it off by creating a UV map.
And right now, by the looks of it, you’re still unsure about how to create UV Map properly.
It seems right now that your UV map is still generated automatically. So I guess, you can start by doing the seams. The seam is basically how you’re going to cut the 3D mesh into 2D planes. And when you’re finished, you can unwrap it to get the UV map.
Once you’ve done that, you can start doing the detailed sculpting. Since you’ve done the UV map on the low poly mesh, when you subdivide the mesh and create a detailed sculpture on it, it will still inherit the UV map created earlier and you don’t have to do that anymore.
Once you’ve done the sculpting, you can then bake the Normal Map on the sculpture, and then use it on the low poly mesh. This way we can give fake free details of high poly mesh onto the low poly mesh, which make the low poly mesh look like it has a lot of details.
So far, what I do to make the meshes is sculpt and then manually retopologize. That involves two object and I’d imagine, two UV maps. So my question is how do I get those seams to perfectly match between the sculpture and the retopologized mesh? Is this also an incorrect step in making a character model? Or am I overthinking it?
Well, if you’re good at math you can actually calculate it to make the seams to perfectly match with one another. Subdivision Modifier basically divides one face into 2x2 face. So if in you poly mesh, you put a seam on the shoulder and hand each, and the distance between then is 8 faces long, then in one-subdivision poly mesh, the distance is going to be 16 faces.
However, it will only work if you use Subdivision Modifier. If by manually retopologize you mean that recreate the low poly mesh from scratch, then there’s no way they could actually match.
If that’s the case, I guess you started it with the wrong setup. Anyway, why do you need to retopologize it in the first place? I mean, if you’ve got a great looking sculpture, you can use it instead.
I use remesh for the sculpture and, to my understanding, that creates a grid instead of the circles around the eyes, mouth, etc. I also make some adjustments to the vertices around the joints of the body, like the ankles, elbows, fingers, and such. I sculpt first, and then recreate another mesh, using the sculpture as a template for a rough estimate where the vertices should go.
Basically, my current knowledge tells me that remesh is basic and would end up with some awkward shading around the curved areas. Is there another way to go about this?
