Baking Question For Shotgun

Three65

I am looking for some input on the best way to go about baking the fallowing. I have watched a few tut on baking and everyone says you want to keep your cage as close as possible. My question is should I back the side rails on this shotgun out separate? Also I don't even know if its possible to add some geo to the main outer shell of the gun and bake the rail as part of that shell. It seems like if I did try to bake the rails in as part of the shell it wouldn't work and probably mess up my bake for the out shell cause my cage would be setting so far away from it. Honestly I am in the dark on how to approach this. Any help would be appreciated.

All these pics are of the high poly model, I am currently working on my low poly and reducing it down.

Bek

Sounds like you want to do an exploded bake. This basically involves moving parts of your mesh away from each other, then baking. Then you use the normal-map on the unexploded, original mesh.

There are tricks that make exploding easier such as using animation keys to go between exploded and unexploded, so depending on your software package, look up how exploding is done.

Also, you can just do a quick test bake to see if this area will actually give you any problems.

Obscura

Personally i never explode my meshes before baking, because there is an option in max to "hit only matching material ID's". Operates to you create a multi/sub-object material, then assign this to the whole mesh, then setting different material ID's to different elements with the material modifier.You need to do this with the high and the lowpoly too, in the same way.Then when you checked this option in the render to texture options, you can bake. I think its a lot better than exploding, because with exploded mesh, you cant bake proper ao.

Three65

So currently on my high and low poly model the rails on the side are three different parts and are basically floating geo. Do I need to combine the 3 parts into one parts on both models?Also do I need to add this geo into the low poly so its not a floating?

ZacD

You can have as much floating or non floating parts as you want. Some game engines deal with floating parts better than others, so you might have some lighting issues with floating parts. A good start place is anything that moves should be floating and baked seperately.

You can have a piece like that as many floating parts as you want on the high poly, but on the low poly I'd make it one piece.

Three65

Awesome that is what I was thinking Zac, but before I went to hacking and welding up my low poly I wanted to make sure. Thanks for the help everyone I appreciate it, I am sure I will run into more problems but that is how you learn

Bek

In this thread EQ outlines some pros and cons of connecting your low-poly into one continuous mesh: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=117017

Three65

Thanks for the link Bek It was a good read and had lots of helpful info I must say. I appreciate you taking the time to point it out to me.