Consistent baking issues

[Gary Dave]

Long time no post, been using 3dc a lot lately without too many issues but now I'm coming up against something that I can't seem to solve:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/r9iw2ai245rdzca/BakeIssues.png?dl=0
(ignore the lighter patch on the top, I know what's causing that)

As you can see, I keep getting these weird dark areas, I've tried baking with name correspondence on/off, using different symmetry's, disabling symmetry entirely, using 100% unique unwraps, using mirrored X unwraps, mirrored Z unwraps. I always seem to get this exact same result. The only thing I can confirm, is that's it not an AO issue, if I disable the baking of AO when going from retopo to sculpt, I still get this issue.

The only thing I'm doing out of the ordinary, is I haven't retopo'd everything. There's more to this chest, but I have everything else hidden, and I've only retopo'd the bits you see above. Saying that, even if 3dc was somehow unhiding the rest of my sculpt assets during the bake, it still would not explain these odd areas.

I have been back to the sculpt room to see if there might be something obvious going on, but for the life of me I cannot work it out. I've tried so may different things but the result is always the same.

Any help would be appreciated.

P.S.
The method of expanding/contracting the bake shells is AMAZING! Thank you so much for working on such a beautiful feature.

[Gary Dave]

Slight update:
If I bake the chest with the planks sculpt hidden, it's fine.
If I bake the planks on their own, they're fine.
But, if I bake them both, I get those oddities appearing on the planks.

I've managed to reduce the baking issues a lot by merging my planks layer into the chest layer (sculpt room), I still get some odd results but those are minimal so I can paint them out myself.

Still not ideal, as I'd of liked to have kept the planks layer completely separate. but oh well. Not sure where it's going wrong, I did a model similar to this last week and had zero issues. Perhaps it's a scale issue, I'll have to double check that tomorrow.

[digman]

Since you have tested a lot. If you can share the link to the file to download, I can look at it. Pm me with a link if you want to keep the file private.

[digman]

After looking at the file, the main problem was the retopo mesh penetrated too far into the sculpt object in some areas. A common problem with thinner sculpt objects. Also possible of having a few non-planar polygons.

Some solutions.

1. Use snap to outer surface surface. Keep your snapping force very low for your vertices.

2. Turn off auto-snap.  You can work this way, requires a little patience.

3. Check your polygons to see if they are non-planar.

The problems were fixed..