Please assist, my AO and Normals are depressing me!

[residentzack]

Hey Mapcore, it's been a while. How you been?

Excellent, well my foray into the modeling world is rocky and I'm getting a bit discouraged.

I was hoping you could help me figure out why my normal and ambient occlusion maps are looking weak as hell.

Here are a few screens before I explain my settings:

I'll post links for the sake of sizing:

Model showing cage projection:

http://i.imgur.com/sqfgQ.jpg

High Poly:

http://i.imgur.com/Tv3rS.jpg

Low poly with smoothing groups [i think Chris Albeluhn mentioned the black shading was bad?]

http://i.imgur.com/9gnIY.jpg

Xnormal settings:

http://i.imgur.com/F

Piss Poor ambient occlusion:

http://i.imgur.com/qec33.jpg

Piss Poor normal map:

http://i.imgur.com/vaaSJ.jpg

I first used the default scanline renderer in 3ds max, and the normals sucked. Tried exporting the high and low poly models as obj's and xnormaled them, and only the AO map looked nice.

Can you tell by looking where I might have gone wrong?

The high poly has chamfered edges and additional geometry for the pipes and circuit boxes. Maybe there's a better way of making smooth edges that show up better?

If you need additional info please let me know.

Thanks in advance, you guys are the best.

[Warby]

you need more "angeled geometry" the top surface of those cubes has the same normal direction as the surface below so it will look pretty much identical add some extra edges /tessilations on those cubes smooth them re render and see what kind of a difference it makes.

[kikette]

An other thing ; You have to know that a normal map doesn't "capture" an heigh difference but the orientation of a surface.

This screen from polycount explain that fact better :

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?act ... hatred.jpg

Second thing ; If you look at the shading of your Lowpoly, you'll see that there's a lot of problem because of your smoothing group.. problem that the normal map will have to solve. You can split some faces into different smoothing (not a problem to bake it since your projection cage is into 1 smoothing group to avoid gaps) or had some champfer but the second way is quite strange since your Highpoly doesn't have so much detail on his edges... I mean, it looks like it has the same resolution as the low mesh !

I suggest you to read that page before your second test

http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap/

[residentzack]

Thanks guys, I think a majority of my problem is that my edges have very subtle chamfers in the high poly, which you can't really tell in the screenshot. I think most of the edges have at least 4 extra lines to them. I'll exaggerate the edges and check the normal projection and check back on polycount again for some additional info.

Maybe since I've got this thread going, I should share my reference picture.

http://i.imgur.com/6aunX.jpg

I'm not trying to recreate everything exactly like the image [i hate copy/pasting exact info] but I'm modeling the bed on the right, which is actually going to be a type of wall or something useless for decoration. Then the ceiling tiles will be my next project. Should I add in a lot more details in the high poly before I bake it again? I want the model to be simple, but I guess I should go all the way.