Xnormal Cage Error

JellyMen

Hello everyone ! I made a mesh using blender 2.7 and I am trying to bake some maps for it. I have it high poly as well as low poly so everything is set. I tried using a cage in xnormal and I get an error message that sounds like this "The cage mesh Default inside C:\....... does not have the same number of vertices than the mesh Default inside the file C:\....." I am absolutely sure that both the low poly and the low poly used as cage have the same number of vertices.

All my meshes are triangulated using the "beautiful" setting, the low poly ones have edge-split and the cage used one has the displace modifier as well.

Please help me I tried everything I could find on the internet but nothing helped. Thanks in advance!!

Quack!

In your export settings, make sure there isn't an 'optimize' option selected.

Jeza87

Manually triangulate your low poly : Edit mode select all then press ctrl + T BEFORE duplicating it to make your cage.

JellyMen

I tried what you guys suggested but still no results... I triangulated the low poly manually exactly as you said, BEFORE duplicating it to make the cage but didn't work.. Thanks for the advice though.

FourtyNights

My workflow is to have "Triangulate" and "Edge Split" modifiers on the stack of the original quad version of my mesh with a name LP_Quads.

If you're using the "Edge Split" modifier, remember only to mark sharp edges to your mesh manually, not by using the "Edge Angle" option, and NEVER apply this modifier in any case, because it actually doubles vertices on sharp edges.

After that I duplicate my quad mesh without applying modifiers yet. Then I rename the object to LP_Triangles. Now it's time to REMOVE the "Edge Split" modifier and apply the "Triangulate" modifier, in that order.

Now that your LP_Triangles model is made completely of triangles (obviously) and still having those sharp edges marked with a blue color, now you can duplicate it to have the third model, LP_Triangles_cage.

When I encompass my cage model over the high poly, I use Alt+S in the edit mode to fatten/shrink the mesh, also known as 'scaling along normals'. But I guess the "Displace" modifier isn't bad to use either. Never tried for cages myself.

I highly recommend to export these as .obj files, and these are pretty much the settings for exporting them.

Notice to enable "Sharp Edges" when exporting both triangulated meshes with those blue sharp edges. "Write Normals" is also needed in every case, so that you can use exported normals in xNormal. But you don't necessarily need to enable UVs to your cage when exporting though.

With this method you should't have that message popping up in xNormal anymore. I got that error when I exported them with "Apply modifiers" enabled in that exporting tab. I guess it's not applying them in a right order or something, so it's better to export without any modifiers left on your triangulated meshes.

Oh, and as a sidenote, when importing your model to 3DS Max with written sharp edges from Blender, they'll appear as correct smoothing groups. (;

JustMeSR

Have you tried reinstalling xNormal? I had a problem with cages too (however the message I got was different), causing me to be unable to use cages.

Reinstalling resolved it (I have suspicion I have done something wrong with handplane plugin).

sgtscience

I ran into this problem while using MAX. Identical topology and I was using the push modifier for the cage, and kept getting the error. What worked for me was exporting the low poly as .3ds, re-importing it, welding all the verts, converting back to editable poly, and remaking the cage. I'm guessing there was some error in the mesh that was getting picked up. I find exporting to .3ds usually helps clean things up