Texture Baking comes out grey!

[popwfx]

I've searched the forums and went through the video tutorials.  I see there was another couple of posts similar some years ago but nothing in those posts applied to me.  I would REALLY appreciate if someone can help me with this.

I have a 32K poly object of a hand in the paint room with about 4 layers of  paint, normal and gloss work.  I have a lowpoly 2K object in a folder on disk that matches it exactly (the retopo was done in 3DC) in external 3D tools (i.e. if I load both the high-res hand object and my low poly object in Lightwave in different layers they align perfectly and both have different UVs).  Neither of these objects are at the origin and when I import into 3DC I select "No Center Snap".

I launch Texture Baking Tool from the Paint Room with the high-res model and multiple paint layers.

I give the dialog the lowpoly object (I've tried both LWO and FBX) set the names of textures and resolution to 4096 and then hit bake

I get a progress bar completing then on disk the Color, Normal are grey and the Roughness is full Black.

Please help - how do I transfer the textures from this high res model to my low poly one with different UVs (but the same pose and placement).??

Attached are pics of the HighRes hand & UVs and the low one.  The UVs are drastically different - but the geometry is very close.

Thanks so much for any help - I really appreciate any help or hints!

 

[Carlosan]

Try this

Keep 32K poly object of a hand in the paint room.

Import lowpoly 2K object on Retopo Room (Retopo > Import)

Bake

Switch back to Paint Room, hide High Poly object.

Hope it help

[popwfx]

6 hours ago, Carlosan said:

Try this

Keep 32K poly object of a hand in the paint room.

Import lowpoly 2K object on Retopo Room (Retopo > Import)

Bake

Switch back to Paint Room, hide High Poly object.

Hope it help

Ok I just did these steps.  But when I switch back to the Paint Room, if I hide the Paint Object for the high poly hand there is nothing there.  I'm confused.  Most of everything in the tutorials and docs seems to assume everyone is Sculpting.  I'm not sculpting, just dealing with low poly objects that I UV and Paint and sometimes Retopo in 3DC.

All my baking is getting seams no matter what settings I do.  So since I couldnt get the bake working - I tried to load the baked lowpoly version into a new 3DC Paint Room and tried to paint over the seams and touch it up - but nothing I do, whether reduction on normal map or smudging or erasing fixes it??

I really appreciate your help!

 

[Carlosan]

On UVlayout, are some polygons overlapped ?

[popwfx]

On 7/2/2020 at 12:08 PM, Carlosan said:

On UVlayout, are some polygons overlapped ?

No overlapping polys - you can see the simple UV map for the low and high poly models above in my posts earlier.

[Carlosan]

Can you share the model (pm) to take a look ?

Texel density is equal for every Uv islands ?

 

 

[popwfx]

Thanks @Carlosan I've eventually got the seams to go away somewhat by playing with the Smoothing UV settings - but then I couldn't get it completely right in all areas of the model - as when I got the knuckles correct the wrist went wonky.  So I ended up exporting both textures and combining them in Photoshop to smooth the normal map errors generated by 3DC.   I'd love to see a comprehensive baking tutorial for people who never use sculpting and just want to make lowpoly game assets.  Thanks for your help.