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Tutorial: Floating Geo on Awkward Shapes

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CapableWizard polycounter lvl 9
Hey guys!

I was discussing the placement of floating geo on more awkward shapes with Joost the other day and came up with a solution which worked pretty well. I haven't seen it anywhere before so I thought I'd do a little write up of the technique. I realise you could really easily do the same using NDo, but I know a lot of people prefer to use geo, as you can get nice realtime feedback on what the final result will look like. Plus you can render out some fancy high poly shots amirite??

So we all know that floating geo is great! no need to have complicated geometry, just plonk the shape onto the area you're going to bake and everything will work out fine!

B2T8e1y.png

But what about when it's on an awkward angle.. like this sphere? Unfortunately it's not quite as simple.

R4BZSRH.png

The first step is to break off the surrounding area around the floater and clone it.

c6KlTcz.png

Select the duplicate and go to edit poly mode. Pick the floater from the dropdown and scale the mesh in the Z direction. You'll notice the whole mesh will flatten to the floater.
Select the piece you broke off earlier and apply a morpher and a turbosmooth. Pick the duplicate as the morph target. If you slide the value around the mesh should flatten at 100 and return to the curve at 0.

ObuSbD1.png

Make sure that the morph is set to 100 (or that the mesh is flat with the floater) and select the floating geo. Add a Skin Wrap modifier on top of the turbosmooth and use the settings below. I found that Face Deformation worked most consistently, but vertex deformation definitely works. Add the underlying geometry and wait a few seconds for it to compute. Once it's done this use morpher on the underlying geometry to morph the mesh from flat to curved once again. The floating geo should miraculously follow it!

KpUUi9I.png

The technique holds up pretty well once baked. It's not a perfect method though and it's worth noting that the more curved the surface, the more noticeable the seam will be. In this example I used a sphere and got a pretty reasonable result, with really minimal seams. You can see below that on a glossy material you can just make out the edge of the floater. I tried it on something which was less curved yesterday and got no visible seams at all. I also think you'd be able to reduce the seam by increasing the turbosmooth iterations on both meshes.

m5bMuM5.png

Hopefully this has been useful for some people, let me know what you think!

Example file here: https://copy.com/C3nHqELlLwJ9hHPE (Excuse my horribly messy greentooth!)

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