Help needed, AGAIN lol

    yes, and this is one of those misteries i can't solve, some models like this above will look like shit with just one smooth group . . .

    ok you definitely got something going on in the normal map there as koko pointed out.

    I would actually point all of those faces on the problem area straight up (x,y,z: 0,0,1) and rebake. that should mean this surface should read as completely flat in your lowpoly, not sure if that's what you've done now, or if they are pointing slightly off or in their corresponding face normal direction.


    If that doesn't work, you could try just having those as hard edges and split the UVs, but I wouldn't really recommend that either.


    BUT remember transferring anything from a highpoly to a lowpoly will always result in tiny inaccuracies no matter what you do really, it's just the nature of it. Some problems are actually easier to just fix by hand afterwards - or not bake at all... I've essentially completely removed the highpoly to lowpoly stage from my workflow nowadays. In this case it'd actually be easy to just color pick those areas and bucketfill/paint in a selection with the avg normal color.

    Quote from PhilipK

    I've essentially completely removed the highpoly to lowpoly stage from my workflow nowadays.


    I'm not an artist, so I'm wondering: what do you do then? Just ignore high poly and use only low poly everywhere?

    Thanks guys for all your support and time, i've made a lil bit more dense HP model and the artiifacts are less visible, so it turned out it was a HP with loops going in bad directions. I'm not such a big hardsurface guys, but now i know that in hard surface stuff everything need to be square and flat lol.

    This screen have some artifacts but less visible,

    [Blocked Image: http://www.knj-art.com/!tmp_img/pc/bake_1.jpg]

    again thanks all of you guys ! <3

    edit:
    Philip so you model all your details in LP aswell with proper shading ? (loads of ppl tell me we are now in time where Pollycount doesn't even matter if it's done reasonable )

    Ah sweet you solved it, yeh the shading of the HP is also important, thought the issue would be with the HP in this case tho .

    As for personal workflow, yes I don't really bake out stuff anymore, only in rare cases. Mostly stuff is broken down to fairly primitive shapes in the end and can easily be unwrapped to simple reusable UVs.

    Even when more unique shapes are necessary I mostly just save out the uv snapshot and nDo or hand paint the normalmap using a small normalmap palette where I got some common angles for 90deg, 45 and so on (hard edges that is).

    Even if you do hard edge something and its not exactly 90 or 45 degrees between the faces a lot of times it's close enough to where you can force your normals to be either manually.

    And yes, tricounts are rarely the bottleneck anymore (texture memory is still an issue a lot of times however). Which is exactly why I see even less use for HP in my workflow, I'm not going to add a shit ton of stuff in my models that will only be there in the HP but not the LP. And if the primary goal of the HP to LP is to add some nice bevels to your edges it's waaay faster to nDo that stuff IMO.

    Quote from PhilipK

    using a small normalmap palette where I got some common angles for 90deg, 45 and so on (hard edges that is).

    Even if you do hard edge something and its not exactly 90 or 45 degrees between the faces a lot of times it's close enough to where you can force your normals to be either manually.


    Can you share this color palette philip ?

    Hey sure thing I'll share the palette I should add a few colors that aren't nDo-specific tho (grey blue channel). Also, I need to caution you that the values will appear a little different depending on the engine you use so a (near) perfect hard edge 90 degree bevel with this palette may produce some inaccuarcy as mine is tweaked for the bitsquid engine really currently (seems to work fine with UDK too and their lightmaps will fck that up anyhow so don't care too much )

    A color wheel like in that vid is really cool too, I'd recommend a faceted one tho with common angles (90, 45, 22.5, 11.25 and so on) as you'll def want to easily find 90deg easily) used something like that a ton on graw 1 and 2

    I saved out a colorwheel with normal colors. This is a 16 sided flat shaded wheel for 45, 90 and 135 degree hard edges (creates a 22.5, 45 or 90 degree "bevel" between the two faces).


    As you can see in the maya viewport shot it's not absolutely perfect, and it really never will be, you should tweak the wheel to be as close as possible in your engine (easy to test, just make a hard edged 90 degree object and map the right bevel color to each edge and check when the seam is as close to invisible as possible).


    [Blocked Image: http://philipk.net/other/colorwheel_normalmap_shot.jpg]


    Regular version:

    http://philipk.net/other/colorwheel_normalmap.tga


    nDo version:

    http://philipk.net/other/colorwheel_normalmap_ndo.tga


    I didn't bother to save out the swatch palette as I think this will be easier for you to pick the colors you wanna use and tweak so it works with your engine's tangents beforehand.

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