Shopping Cart
Normals won't bake for me?
January 16, 2011 - 11:35am
- 1166 reads
Hi I'm new here and having trouble making my normal map.
Ok so i'm experimenting with making normal maps so I've made a basic bridge with just some planks and i'm wanting to bake them onto the low poly mesh, which is a standard flat rectangle.
I've followed this guys tutorial http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-hoCUjn1wA which seemed very straight forward. however when i click generate maps it just renders out a flat purple plain with no detail from the high poly mesh. the "high" poly mesh is actually quite low poly, but i just wanted to do something simple to make sure it works well for me but so far it hasn't. I've uploaded an image of my result when trying to create the normal map.
Any help would be really appreciated.
Yep sure thing... here's a shot of the low and high poly models and a shot of the low poly UVs
Ok.
You wont get good results because your highpoly has all 90 deg. angles, which cant be baked well as they look flat to the renderer.
Add bevels to the edges of the HP or supporting loops and subsurf and it should work fine 
Thanks for your help, I'm going to try it out tomorrow and I'll let you know how it goes
No problem
I'm still getting the same result once I've beveled the mesh. I've attached an image of the beveled mesh for you to see, that should have worked right? (i went on to triangulate it in order to bake the normals btw)
Is your LP mesh over your HP mesh?
The LP must be covering (on top of) the HP mesh for baking too work correctly.
Have you tried to setup a cage in a way that covers completely the HP mesh?
It's working now, that was an error on my part not having the low over the high poly. I tired it out in maya first with a transfer map which worked, and then 2nd using xNormal. xNormal gives a better sharper result, but parts of the normal map has staggered shading. Is there a way i can avoid this before baking via a setting in xNormal?
Try to enable AA.
Sure your UV's vertical coords are really linear at the extremes and sure the LP/HP are correctly aligned.
Use pixel snap.
It's working now, that was an error on my part not having the low over the high poly.
Use cages if it's possible. That will save you a lot of headaches.
Sorry for the late reply, I've been away form my computer for a few days.
I used snap to point to make sure its properly aligned but I'm still getting the same issue. Below is a screen cap of the low over high mesh in x-ray view, an it looks pretty lined up to me. What is and how would i check AA and cages, I'm new to xNormal. I'd take a guess and say cages are the same as an envelope when doing a transfer map in Maya?
Can you post pics of your HP, LP and UVs please?
www.metalliandy.com | Twitter | Knald Open Beta | 110 Free Custom Bolt Alphas | Barbed Wire Baseball Bat