Envelope question

Scruples

Anyone know if this is possible to automate or do without a great deal of work in Maya or Xnormal?.

I know that baking without an envelope respects hard-edges but you lose the ability to bake floating geometry.

I tried selecting all hard-edges and using the "separate selected edges" bonus tool command but it is worthless (only works on very clean quad geometry).

Any ideas?.



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ivars

I don't think envelope in Maya and cage i xNormal is really the same thing. The envelope in Maya only affects the distance of the search rays and not the direction. That is controlled by either setting the Search Method to "Surface" or "Geometry".

Anyways, here's how I would go about splitting the geometry in that way. It's a few clicks, but I think it would be easy enough to script.

Scruples

B]Edit[/B Well, changing the envelope from geometry normals to surface normals gave me the effect I was looking for, thx
so never mind this crap V

Sadly, this is what I get when I try that. (Maya 2009)


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ivars

Ah, that is indeed the result you got in earlier versions. Dunno when they fixed that, I'm on 2011.