Weird glitches in baked cavity map

[alb.ots]

I’m following the Blender Character Creator v2.0 for Video Games Design course on udemy, and just got to the baking section. I’m having some issues with parts of my baked cavity map that look glitched that I can’t find the reason why. I’ve looked around in the forums, Q&A section of Udemy, and reddit, but couldn’t find a solution. I’m currently using blender 2.91.0.

To better illustrate, I will post some images about my meshes and the glitches I’m seeing, and what I have already tried to do to fix it.

This is my High Poly mesh:

This is my Low Poly mesh:

This is how both meshes overlay:

This is the material of the HP mesh:

This is the material of the LP mesh

This is the texture image with the cavity map baked into:

These are the baking settings:

These are sample images with the glitches I’m talking about circled in red:

This is a sample image with the cavity map (together with the normal map) textured on the orc, to show an example of these glitches:

What have I tried:

• Playing around with the Max Ray Distance, Extrusion, Cage, and Cage Extrusion options. Thus far, my best settings were the ones in the baking settings example (Max Ray Distance = 0 and Extrusion >= 1m)
• Trying CPU and GPU baking
• Deleting the scene light
• Tried both Non-color and sRGB for the textures/texture node
• Tried 32 float when creating the texture
• Looked for inverted normals

And yet, those glitches persist. Does anyone has any idea what the problem might be? Thank you!

[FedPete]

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[FedPete]

• Check also, if your model don’t have additional mesh (merge by distance).
• Check Normals.
• No mesh overlaps in your UVMap

[NP5]

It is odd it does not seem to be related to mesh sticking through.
Is the underlying high poly mesh in those areas ‘unsmooth’ so it is baking it as best as it can represent it?
Is it image pixelation? Try a 4k map.

[alb.ots]

@FedPete

• Check also, if your model don’t have additional mesh (merge by distance).
• Check Normals.
• No mesh overlaps in your UVMap

Normals were ok, last I checked, none of them inverted. I’ll try merging by distance. I’m pretty sure no mesh overlap in the UV map as well, since I used the option to separate islands.

@NP5

It is odd it does not seem to be related to mesh sticking through.
Is the underlying high poly mesh in those areas ‘unsmooth’ so it is baking it as best as it can represent it?
Is it image pixelation? Try a 4k map.

Hmm, interesting ideas. I’ll take a look if there is any smoothing issues in those areas, though I’d say there aren’t. I’ll also try a higher res map.

Another thing I did try was creating a cage for the baking (by duplicating the low poly mesh and scaling it alongside the normals), but the results were even worse.

[alb.ots]

Tried:

• Checking normals again, all ok
• Merging by distance to eliminate issues with the mesh
• Redid unwrapping, to guarantee no overlaping UVs
• Tried a higher res map (4096x4096)
• Tried to smooth those areas in the HP mesh and look for inconsistencies
• Tried updating Blender to 2.93

No luck, the glitches persist. One weird thing: in the lecture, Grant performs baking while in Rendered Viewport Shading. If I try baking while in Rendered Viewport Shading, I end up with a all-black texture.

Still, I have no idea what is happening

[NP5]

Try appending just the objects you need into a new file.

Also make sure your high poly only has the default material on it. (See recent baking question’s answer)

The new file ‘trick’ sometimes solves some odd glitches.

[alb.ots]

Tried that, but no luck, the same glitches still appear, but thanks for the suggestion!

[FedPete]

To me, it looks as if the artifact information, picked up by the baking process, comes from a different part of your model.Meaning a face, or faces has a relation to other parts. Which can be

• doubles
• mesh uv map faces overlapping
• different (shared) materials

Also, your high mess has a lot of sculpting accessories (bumps shoulder back). For me these are huge!.
Like if you want to generate the horns on the low res using a bump map without any mesh on the head.
So maybe your low res model just too low res?

[alb.ots]

Yeah, that is my impression about the artifacts as well. However, I did look for duplicates and overlapping UVs in the Low Poly mesh, but there doesn’t seem to be any. About the materials, I set them individually for both meshes, so I can’t see how there might be any issue in that regard.

There is one last thing I’m looking into which is how the baking process uses disk space to complete. I noticed that when I start baking, it takes plenty of disk space (most likely cacheing something), and since my partition where blender store those intermediate files is quite empty, it might be affecting the baking process somehow. But that is speculation on my part.