Baking from one mesh to another. Normals are blank.

[shotgunefx]

Hi All,

I'm new to 3D coat and still trying to learn my way around. I have a high resolution mesh which I sculpted previously in Sculptris and I already have a low poly retopology that I wish to bake to (after painting).

So I imported the mesh, and it's in Surface mode. Under Retopo, I import the low res mesh. After painting the hi-res, if I bake, the textures work fine, displacement, etc, but my normal map is just entirely gray.

Does the mesh need to be voxelized before baking?

Thanks!

[AbnRanger]

Hi All,

I'm new to 3D coat and still trying to learn my way around. I have a high resolution mesh which I sculpted previously in Sculptris and I already have a low poly retopology that I wish to bake to (after painting).

So I imported the mesh, and it's in Surface mode. Under Retopo, I import the low res mesh. After painting the hi-res, if I bake, the textures work fine, displacement, etc, but my normal map is just entirely gray.

Does the mesh need to be voxelized before baking?

Thanks!

Surface mode is fine. Did you merge the model into the Paint Room? Any chance you can screen record the problem so we can see what step is missing or if it's a bug? Jing is a free screen recorder and you can upload the recording to their screencast.com website (free). It's really good for this kind of purpose.

Sounds like you may be in Microvertex mode, which works with Displacment maps. Per Pixel Painting works with Normal Maps.

[digman]

I will be talking about the baking tool since shotgunefx mentioned the word baked but I'm not sure if he meant the texture baking tool. Shotgunefx, after merging to the paint room there is no need to use the baking tool either in the paint room or the retopo room.

Ah, yes, I reread your post. I think you are saying you poly-painted (vetex painting) the surface mode model and then used the texture baking tool in the retopo room.

It's an old surface mode bug if you use the baking tool from the retopo room before merging to the paint room. I tested version 4 beta and it is still there in the linux version.

It will bake the displacement map just fine but the tangent base normal map will be grey... I will post a bug report later this coming week. Till the bug gets fixed you can merge for PPP to get your normal map.

EDIT: The stuff below is just good to know anyway and of course AbnRanger knows this stuff already.

Now, if you merge to the paintroom using MV and use the baking tool from there you can create a nice tangent base looking normal map. At least in version 4 beta.

I can not remember if older versions had trouble with the baking tool for normal maps in the paint room when in MV mode creating just grey normal maps.

You can get a good tangent based normal map in MV mode even without using the baking tool. Under the textures menu select Normal Map (TS, layer"0"based)

In the picture on the left is the normal map created from the textures menu using Normal Map (TS, Low-poly mesh)

On the right is the Normal Map (TS, layer"0"based)

The normal maps were created in MV mode. It's some bumps thrown on a surface mode sphere but it is just to show that a tangent base normal map is created.