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3 Dimensional Chat / Blender Normal Map Bake Problem

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SJHooks
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Posted: 17th May 2010 02:25
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Well, I wanted to work on normal map baking. So I made a model, made the high poly, w/e, and then baked. The bake actually worked nearly perfectly, but there's just one problem I've come across every bake. When I have a low poly curved surface, the edges are visible in the shape of an octagon, decagon, dodecagon, etc. and usually when I bake the normal map, the the smooth, actually circular shape of the highpoly gets imprinted on the low poly, which I find rather annoying. This is what I mean:
Any advice? I use blender 2.49 btw, in case anyone needed to know.

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Madscientist
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Posted: 17th May 2010 02:37
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The problem is that your low poly and high poly models have too much of a size difference. The low poly should not have edges that protrude farther than the same edges of the high poly. You should scale down the edges a very tiny amount so that they are barely smaller or the same size than the high poly.

If it hasn't exploded yet, I haven't touched it.
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SJHooks
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Posted: 17th May 2010 02:48 Edited at: 17th May 2010 02:49
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Well, I kept that in mind, but how I did it was I made the low poly, sub-surfed, and then added edge loops to the edges of places like that to keep the shape, but there isn't really anything that I can help at this point... should I just create the low poly from the high poly, seeing as that would keep the shape? Or is there any way to fix the problem now?

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Ortu
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Posted: 18th May 2010 06:51
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well the smoothing applied by the subsurf actually shrinks the mesh a bit.

your pic shows the angles where the faces of the low poly meet outside the smooth circumference of the bake so that the flat midpoint of the faces touch the outside of the subsurfed mesh, I think madscientist is saying to scale it so that those angles which stick out are touching the inside of the subsurfed mesh.

Normal maps are just an illusion which tend to fall apart when it gets to the silhouette. They work best in viewing the surface of a model rather than it's outline, so you may need to budget a few more polies at the end of a cylinder where/if the edge can be seen and retopologize it down to 8 for the length of the body and let smoothing round it off visually.


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SJHooks
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Posted: 19th May 2010 02:06
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Quote: "retopologize it down to 8 for the length of the body and let smoothing round it off visually."
Heh, I'm a bit confused by that . I've been using topology for some few days now, after browsing CGTuts, but never really learned a proper way to use it in a case other than an organic model. Are you saying just do the draw/click thing to put each vertex in place, or that I theres a way to get the subsurfed high poly model to retopologize with the low poly by itself?

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Madscientist
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Posted: 23rd May 2010 02:32
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Like I said before, just scale down each loop till it fits the subsurfed mesh.

If it hasn't exploded yet, I haven't touched it.
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