Rippling errors in normal bake

[Godo]

Hello - as you can see below I have some strange errors in my bake. This causes the rear, shaded area to look gouged out when rendered. There's also a strange area of discoloration, I have no idea what that is. Do I need more polys on the wheel? I think I have enough, but I dunno...

Normal map


Render


High-Low Comparison

[Talon]

It's a common issue with the ends of cylindrical objects. It's because the low poly normals at the edges don't fire exactly through the path of the high poly's edges.

To get around it, if you're using 3DS Max, you can alter the projection cage so that it's almost flat along the caps of the ring. That should considerably reduce the wavy edges.

Ben Mathis covers it quite well at the bottom of this page in his normal map tutorial. Ben Mathis


*edit; Oh, and that wonky bit looks like a flaw in your mesh that's causing the raycasting to balls up. Double check you've not got two overlapping polygons or extra vertices around that area.

[Godo]

Thanks I took a second look at the UVs and the faces were out of order on one side. Probably because I used a copy-paste, that rarely seems to work correctly. Reordering them fixed the weird area.

Still a bit wavy, but I guess I'll have to fix that in PS.