I'm trying to work through Intro to Normal Map Modeling for Games. I'm working through the exercise but I'm finding it extremely difficult to get a decent normal bake.
Despite spending hours on it - the best I've manged is still just *okay* - with plenty of visual artifacts. I've watched the series twice to see if there's anything I'm missing - but I'm out of ideas as far as what else to try.
Any thoughts as to what to try next would be much appreciated!
Hey Brendan, it looks like you're really close! I definitely hit my head against the wall a few times trying to find all the info for that course, so I'm sure there's things I didn't run into that I can add later (like bit depth, I'm adding a video on that soon).
For the areas where it looks like there are chunks of the wrong color, try making your cage larger. I'm not sure exactly why, but it solved it for me.
For the weird saw pattern on the bottom left, tilt the island so it's no longer at an angle. Since it's not hitting the pixels directly, it's blending to make the diagonal line (try drawing a diagonal line with a hard brush in Photoshop, you'll see it doesn't match up to the pixels like a perfectly horizontal or vertical line) and trying to interpolate from that approximation. So rotating it so that it's lying straight should fix it. Hope that helps!
Thanks for your advice Jonathan. I played around with it a bit more and got something that was good enough to submit. The finished result is here
It's not easy getting decent results!
You may also know that getting perfect normals is quite complicated and having few little artifacts like this is perfectly normal.
I've been into industry leaders tutorials about normals baking, and they also have this kind of trouble but...
You can edit your normals witth Photoshop for exemple and paint, or stamp buggy areas. this is part of the job.
good work anyway and Jonathan is realy doing a fantastic job with these assets tutorials.
I've been into industry leaders tutorials about normals baking, and they also have this kind of trouble but...You can edit your normals witth Photoshop for example and paint, or stamp buggy areas. this is part of the job.
Thanks Pierrick! This makes me feel a bit better, I've done that before and feel like I'm cheating 😄