Questions about xnormal cages, exploded bakes, and Maya
polycounter lvl 12
I have a handful of questions that are kind of unrelated but its easier to put them in all one thread.
(ANSWERED) Exploded baking. I know how to do a exploded bake, that is simple enough, but what do you do for the AO map? Do you bake the AO from the exploded bake or do you do it from the combined mesh to get more accurate self shadow detail?
(ANSWERED) Xnormal and Maya cages. I have started making my cages in Maya instead of xnormal because it is easier to tweak, and usually gets a better result. However do I have to do anything to the normals of the cage? Should I leave them the same smoothing groups as the low poly? smooth them all? or harden them all?
Looking for Maya tools/scripts. Maya is lacking a lot of polygon tools, and I was wondering if anybody knew any scripts that could help me out.
1) A script to select a face or a set of verts and align them to be cylindrical. So if I select a face that has 8 verts on it, and use this tool will simply snap them into an 8 sided cylinder.
2) A interactive way to extrude around a corner. I know Modo has this, but I forget what they call it. All you do is select the face you want, use this tool, tell it the degrees, the rotation pivot, and how many segments and its done. Super simple, but Maya has no way to do this with the extrude tool at all. The only way to get a half way decent result in maya is to use a torus primitive and patch it into where you need which takes way to much time.
If you have any Maya modeling scripts at all that help beef up the tool set that would be much appreciated as well.
Thanks for your time.
(ANSWERED) Exploded baking. I know how to do a exploded bake, that is simple enough, but what do you do for the AO map? Do you bake the AO from the exploded bake or do you do it from the combined mesh to get more accurate self shadow detail?
(ANSWERED) Xnormal and Maya cages. I have started making my cages in Maya instead of xnormal because it is easier to tweak, and usually gets a better result. However do I have to do anything to the normals of the cage? Should I leave them the same smoothing groups as the low poly? smooth them all? or harden them all?
Looking for Maya tools/scripts. Maya is lacking a lot of polygon tools, and I was wondering if anybody knew any scripts that could help me out.
1) A script to select a face or a set of verts and align them to be cylindrical. So if I select a face that has 8 verts on it, and use this tool will simply snap them into an 8 sided cylinder.
2) A interactive way to extrude around a corner. I know Modo has this, but I forget what they call it. All you do is select the face you want, use this tool, tell it the degrees, the rotation pivot, and how many segments and its done. Super simple, but Maya has no way to do this with the extrude tool at all. The only way to get a half way decent result in maya is to use a torus primitive and patch it into where you need which takes way to much time.
If you have any Maya modeling scripts at all that help beef up the tool set that would be much appreciated as well.
Thanks for your time.
Replies
cage should be all soft edges, although it's better if you understand why this is, so check out the 'you're making me hard' thread and/or polycount wiki
can't help with the maya stuff sorry.
- Use Transfer Maps tool with good envelopes for my normal map bake. I just always seem to get better results with Maya, and I always try to eliminate as many import-export processes with baked normals as possible. Less chance of tangent basis issues, even if the apps are supposed to be synced.
- When baking with Transfer Maps, do two things in the Transfer Maps tool: On your low poly target meshes, turn the envelope visibility on. You'll see that the envelopes are simply parented to your low poly mesh. Also, under Advanced Options, un-check "Delete envelopes on bake."
- Once you have your normals baked, select your envelopes (and only the envelopes), un-parent them from your low poly, and export those as an FBX for your cage in Xnormal.
- If you have multiple pieces, make sure your low poly meshes are in the same order in the Outliner as your corresponding envelope/cage meshes, otherwise Xnormal will complain about vert order or mis-matched geo.
- Import high poly/low poly/cage into Xnormal for AO/cavity and whatever else you want. xNormal does a much better, quicker job without the complications of Mental Ray. Using the exported envelopes from Maya as your xNormal cage will help guarantee your AO and cavity match up to your normal bake.
As mentioned above, I bake AO both exploded for the high poly detail, and then non-exploded for the larger scale occlusion between pieces. For the "low poly" occlusion I don't both with the high poly mesh anymore. Just plug the low poly mesh into xNormal for both the high and low res mesh.
As far as your cages, two things to note:
1) Try to do as little, if any, manual tweaking of mesh components on your cages as possible. It just complicates workflow and creates more work if you have to re-bake.
2) With the above workflow, you don't have to mess with the cage normals at all. The default settings on the Transfer Maps tool will work just fine. FYI though, typically with averaged ray projection bakes your cage/envelope normals would be "soft", or averaged, so you don't have any gaps in your projections.
Still looking for those Maya scripts if anybody has them
Select the face and one of its edges as the pivot. You can set the Angle and the Divisions in the channel box (or in the tool's options)
Select the edges you want, convert to curve, and then revolve that curve, setting the output to polygons.
Ahh, I got you, I'm wishing for better things in Maya's poly workflow too.