Cylinder Projection Mapping Issue (Please Help)

[orionburcham]

I'm learning to projection map, but I've run into a problem many of you have probably faced. I've made a high poly mesh of several chamfer cylinders, and low poly mesh for projecting. I unwrapped the lp, and successfully projected the high poly to the low.

My problem comes from the wavy lines that max renders onto my projected maps, where I want there to be straight ones. To replicate this problem for solving, I made a simplified version. I then labeled it in the writing of a small child:

http://www.nickelcadmium.net/show/telescope/wavy_lines_problem1.jpg

So there you can see the arcing lines, vs the original straight. I think I understand why this happens, but I don't know how to fix it. I looked in several tutorials where people projection map cylinders in the same way. They all end up with the same problem, but they seem to ignore it.

So does anyone out there know a good way around this problem? Any tips would be really helpful. I'm stuck in a project right now until i can get past this issue.

Thanks a lot-
-Orion

[airbrush]

I've encountered this before and created a tutorial for a workflow method I developed that will fix this. Baking of low poly cylinders and spherical objects often generate this type of resulting normalmap.
see link
http://boards.polycount.net/showpost.php?p=761510&postcount=8

[Saidin311]

Well sometimes these things can be fixed by adding a bit of geometry. For example, rounding off the ends, or maybe adding a chamfer or two. 12 sides around might be much, so you could probably get away with 8-10 sides and use the polys to make more of the rounder parts.

Sometimes it's the projection cage. Make sure to reset the cage and push it out. Sometimes manual tweaking of the cage verts can help as well. There's a technical explanation as to why this happens, but I'm not 100% sure about it. It has to do with the rays casting out from the cage, or something like that.

The final tweak would be to physically paint out the wobbly areas, in the drastic case of that one it might not work. But in some smaller cases its a quicker solution than rebaking everything.

Anyways, theres a TON of tips in this thread:
http://boards.polycount.net/showthread.php?t=55754

Maybe I'll beat Eric to the wiki post!
http://wiki.polycount.net/Normal_Map#SolvingWavyLines