How to cleanly bake closely overlapping geometry?

Boozebeard

I've got a shirt model and I'm wondering what methods there are to get clean bakes on areas that overlap very closely such as where it buttons up down the middle and where the collar folds over the shoulders. Obviously the cage tends to intersect the wrong parts a lot in these areas.

What I'm currently trying is cutting the model into parts so I can basically do an exploded bake of these areas. Thinking about it though wouldn't this leave me open to the same errors as baking hard edges with an "explicit mesh normals" cage? i.e gaps in the bake where the meshes have been split? So far it seems to be working but this might just be because the mesh is split in areas that are planar enough not to make a noticeable gap.

Are there better ways to do this? The only other thing I can think of would be to have a morph map where things like the collar are slightly raised and the two halves of the front slightly parted.

Boozebeard

I suppose if I were getting gaps with the exploded method I could always adjust the vertex normals along the breaks back to their averaged directions?

Boozebeard

No one got any tips?

slosh

I do what you mentioned which is splitting my mesh into separate parts for baking to prevent overlap.  I usually place the seams where they are well hidden such as along actual seams in the clothing.  One other possibility is baking in substance.  I hear they have a function that can prevent errors in overlapping geo when baking but its still not perfect...still worth a shot.  

Boozebeard

Actually substance is what I'm using but the feature you're probably talking about just checks for matching mesh names of the high and low poly. So you still have break it into separate meshes, just don't have to actually explode them. Thanks for commenting though, good to know I'm not missing something obvious or doing something flawed.