Texture baking issues

[Wilson (Overwatch)]

When I try to bake my mesh, this happens: https://imgur.com/a/uj8mQ
Each of the black (shadow?) lines is where faces join (Yes, the faces probably looks like a real mess, but am slowly clearing it up). I have tried this on multiple render settings, including Full Render, and ambient occlusion, using normal unwrapping, smart unwrapping, and what I am currently using, lightmap packing, with some settings changed such as the margin and all that. The only thing in common with the bakes are it is the same model. Any help? This issue doesn't seem to be going away...

https://imgur.com/a/uj8mQ - The issue itself

https://imgur.com/a/ATpiX - Here is the baked texture for reference

Any and all help is appreciated!

[Pte Jack]

That one area where the texture is bad looks like the polygon was missed in the unwrap and is deformed over differet areas of the texture. Check your unwrapped UV. Also, in the darker areas (if it's not suoopose to be dark, check the direction of your normals, they could be facing inwards.

[Wilson (Overwatch)]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

That one area where the texture is bad looks like the polygon was missed in the unwrap and is deformed over differet areas of the texture. Check your unwrapped UV. Also, in the darker areas (if it's not suoopose to be dark, check the direction of your normals, they could be facing inwards.

The normals are definitely facing in the right direction, as I have backface culling turned on, and the polygon's issue seems to be linked to the general issue of the faces being shaded at the edges, as I have checked and almost everything (-1 or two slightly warped faces) is completely fine on the texture, unless I missed something.

[still__alive]

Okay, sorry if this comes across harshly, but I think part of the issue might be your unwrapping technique. It looks like a pretty poor unwrap. If I'm not mistaken, you've literally got each face as it's own separate uv - that is a lot of wasted texture space. Then I also suspect there might be a little bleed over so you might need to increase your margins. That looks like it will be difficult with the way you've unwrapped the mesh.

So basically I'm recommending that you revist your unwrap and maybe look up some unwrapping methods. Even tutorials from other programs apply, if they are giving you some kind of idea of WHERE you want your seams to be.

Notice how you have a whole bunch of tiles in your unwrap that are sharing the same color/texture, but each still have their own separate space on the texture map. That is using your space poorly, you could have overlapping uvs that are sharing the same color/texture on the same part of the texture map, which would let you free up space on your texture map for other details, or scaling the size of the uv up and adding more detail for a particular uv section.

Also, based on my (current) understanding of uvs and some other stuff, I'm also fairly certain that the way you've unwrapped this is also going to add a whole lot of vertices you don't technically need. That is if you are putting this in a game engine and/or working with some kind of polycount budget. At the video card/game engine level, a uv seam is seen with as much verts as the unwrapped uvs. So, for example, an 8 vert cube in Blender unwrapped in the typical T unwrap will actually be considered as having 14 vertices in a game engine or at the video card level.

If I were to have a seam on every edge of the basic cube, and unwrap each face as its own (as I think you've done), then technically speaking I believe that a game engine or video card will see that model as having 24 vertices instead of the 8 vertices that Blender says it has.

[Wilson (Overwatch)]

Originally posted by still__alive:

Okay, sorry if this comes across harshly, but I think part of the issue might be your unwrapping technique. It looks like a pretty poor unwrap. If I'm not mistaken, you've literally got each face as it's own separate uv - that is a lot of wasted texture space. Then I also suspect there might be a little bleed over so you might need to increase your margins. That looks like it will be difficult with the way you've unwrapped the mesh.

So basically I'm recommending that you revist your unwrap and maybe look up some unwrapping methods. Even tutorials from other programs apply, if they are giving you some kind of idea of WHERE you want your seams to be.

Notice how you have a whole bunch of tiles in your unwrap that are sharing the same color/texture, but each still have their own separate space on the texture map. That is using your space poorly, you could have overlapping uvs that are sharing the same color/texture on the same part of the texture map, which would let you free up space on your texture map for other details, or scaling the size of the uv up and adding more detail for a particular uv section.

Also, based on my (current) understanding of uvs and some other stuff, I'm also fairly certain that the way you've unwrapped this is also going to add a whole lot of vertices you don't technically need. That is if you are putting this in a game engine and/or working with some kind of polycount budget. At the video card/game engine level, a uv seam is seen with as much verts as the unwrapped uvs. So, for example, an 8 vert cube in Blender unwrapped in the typical T unwrap will actually be considered as having 14 vertices in a game engine or at the video card level.

If I were to have a seam on every edge of the basic cube, and unwrap each face as its own (as I think you've done), then technically speaking I believe that a game engine or video card will see that model as having 24 vertices instead of the 8 vertices that Blender says it has.

Yes, I haven't gone around and tidied up the faces completely yet, I do a small amount of fixing when I can but haven't done a proper clean yet. I have tried with all sorts of margins, using 0.1 between the islands(when using smart unwrap and lightmap pack) and ranging from 0-16 PX for the bake's margin, yet nothing changes, the texture remains broken...
I am not having overlapping polygons as so far this is a basic colouration, I will be adding additional textures and details later on.The issue also applies to my larger faces, not just my small ones that are clustered together, so what could it be?


Edit: I played around with the bake margins, and this time it fixed almost all of the texture issues (I tried the exact same thing yesterday but nothing was changes...). The only ones left appear to be slightly warped faces that I can fix very easily (Although there is still the matter of the badly shaded faces, may just have to redo them)