houGenie

Why do you not use 3d coat for baking ? I have tried it with the unreal preset in the preferences and the normal maps look fine. See picture. Yes there are a lot of settings to be aware of, but this is better than to not be able to change this settings, because depending of your target you need this options! MikkTSpace should be the correct one. And the normal calculation setting is important too, because depending on how XNormal calculates their normals 3d coat should also calculate the normals, otherwise the normal map will not match to the normals. I tried with XNormal and did not get good results also in 3d Coat, unfortunately. I am not sure anyone has tried this and was successfull With bake -> Import Coarse mesh you should be able to import the cage. But you really do not need one in this simple case. The good thing in 3d Coat is, that you can adjust the cage with the brush strokes. Read the happy normal baking guide for more infos. Btw. did you try to invert the green channel, when importing the normal map? Helps sometimes. The only quality setting I am aware of for the normal map is the normal map resolution. Calculate 8K and scale down the map, this will get you really good quality. There is no antialiasing setting in 3d Coat unfortunately.

I assume that the normal calculation is not the same across the different programs. Have you tried to change the normal calculation in the preferences?

Thank you! They work now.

Can you please update the links? Unfortunately they are dead. Would be really thankfull!

I have tested it also, and it did not work for me either.

Thank you Andrew. Very good work from you and your team, awesome!

Hi guys, I am using the mouse Wheel + Shift for brush rotation. Unfortunately one step of rotation increments the rotation of the brush by an amount of 322 degrees. Is there a possibility to make the stepping finer ? Did not find it in the preferences. Thanks for the help!

How can I mark the thread as solved?

You have an asterisk ✳ in the title bar in your file name when the file is not saved. If you save it will vanish.

4.8 is 2017?! Loong wait if true.... Time to get better in the art itself 3d Coat is already really powerful.

Thank you digman. I very appreciate your support. You are of course right, that the topology is very important for this. The baking process is really a lot of fiddling around. For example non planar faces are really hard to fix, because if you correct one you break the other. What you call tension in normal is the same what I first called as the reason behind the artifacts. Because the normals are smoothed you have another tangent base in comparison to hard edge normals and the "tension" is bigger. That is the reason the normal map is really clean in knald with the same model, because it uses another tangent base because of the hardened normals (another option is to use support edges). That is the reason I wanted to use the "lock normals" option, which at the moment does nothing in 3d Coat Yes, I do no bevels on the LP model, had them before but removed them because the result was good enough. I have improved the topology like you advised and now it seems to work fine. At least the topology is now better. And the baking result is pleasant to look at. Again thank you very much, must be hard work to look for errors in other ppl models

I have tried to improve the UV map, but it is still visible (weaker). Not with the metal_dark material which you use, but for example with the material gold_rough.

Hi guys, I like 3d Coat and hope it will develop to an important tool in the industry. For me it is interesting what the future brings. When will wersion 5 release, and what new features will be included? Is someone here who can give insight into this?

Thank you, I will look into this. Can you provide me your modifications with the modified 3d Coat file?

Sure! probe.obj

The whole process is in 3d Coat. Load HP in sculpt room, load LP in retopo, bake in retopo to paint room --> artifacts. Knald was only an example that this issues is software dependent. I have inserted you a file. Hope it helps, thank you! probe.3b

Hi guys, I have a little issue when normal baking with 3d Coat. There are some artifacts on the mesh which are only visible with some shiny shaders and with an certain angle. 1. Pic one shows low poly and the issue marked in red 2. Pic two shows the low poly mesh in wire mode 3. Pic three shows the high poly mesh 4. Pic four shows normal map on low poly mesh 5. Pic five shows normal map in knald I have already tried all normal map software presets in the preferences, no difference. My guess is that when importing the retopo mesh and checking the "lock normal" option, 3d coat ignores this option and calculates all normals as soft. This seems to be a bug. When everything is soft, then the normal map will look like in 4. and thus these artifacts. I have baked with different Software, see pic 5, which take the normals from the obj file and the artifacts are not there because the hard edges are not softened and therefore the normal map is flat in the regions which have the artifacts in 3d Coat. I think the "lock normal" bug breaks the whole baking process for more complicated meshes, are the developers aware of this? So how can I solve this problem in 3d Coat? Any one an idea? Thanks in advance.

Yes, 3D Coat and Houdini are a great combo. I wish Houdini would be better at modeling, Maya is far stronger in this respect. But this new reducing algo in 16.5, looks awesome !

Interesting. 1000 Dollars, hmm. Is there a beta or something to try ?

Carlosan, yes of course. But you get the seams also when you have hard edges, UV splits and use the explicit surface normal method and not the projection method. Because the normals will have 90 degrees on hard edges and the rays will not cover all the details. That is the reason the projection method is used.

Yes, normals are exported and can be seen in athore apps. The only thing which seems to work is the auto smoothing group option. But then there are seams on the baked normal map, seems like no projection method is used.

OK, so it seems that 3d Coat does always calculate the normals new and ignores the existing normals of the faces when baking?

Hi guys, I am normal baking my mesh and have some questions. What method does 3d Coat use for normal baking? Is it the projection method or is it the explicit surface normal method? It seems, that 3d Coat always smooths my normals when baking, even when I activate lock normals in baking menu. Then after the baking process if I deactivate the normal map (painting room) one sees that alle hard edges are smoothed. But unfortunately because of this you have way more gradients in the normal map. The only way to get rid of that is to bevel hard edges in the low poly model before normal baking. Is there some better method ? And how on earth can I prevent that 3d Coat smooths my hard edges?

Thank you for the infos, I will try it.

Yes! This works. Thank you very much for your effort. But I do not get it. I thought there is a recalculation anyway, so why is a rotation of the islands relevant ? Why does a rotation of an Island change the normal vector ? I thought only the color information is used to store the normal vector (a difference vector to the vertex normal to be precise).