AO Baking with floating Geo

ajr2764

Ok so I read some stuff already but I'd figure I'd ask to see what general practices are done. I have floating detail on alot of geometry that leaves nasty shadows when baking from high to low. Baking in modo right now and did a bake of the entire low and thinking just baking the seperate pieces with detail and doing some photoshop work.

MagnificentMicrowave

I just bake all at once and paint the unwanted shadows out, doesn't take too long anyway. But if someone has a better way of dealing with this, I'd like to see that as well.

SnowInChina

imho ndo2 can generate an AO from your normalmap

Hexidine

you can easily fix this with exploded baking, just put the object how they should on frame 1 and move them apart on frame 2. you do this you can easily go back to your original model.
you can then bake your normal when its together, and bake AO when they are apart. and just move the stuff you don't want to cast AO. its pretty easy to do and it works just fine.
Hope it helps.

passerby

exploded bake, just bake twice once exploded once not.

fattkid

I bake my floaters on a separate pass, then composite them in PS. No clean up required.

EarthQuake

Xnormal has an option to ignore backfaces, this prevents shadows from floating geometry. Max can do something similar I think, but even if you're using max/maya, you can use the SBM exporter and render just AO in xnormal.

You can also disable shadow cast in the object properties on your floater meshes in max?

Explode baking is to avoid errors with intersecting geometry, it wouldn't help with small floaters casting shadows.

Painting them out/baking multiple maps is a real pain in the ass, its what I used to do but there is generally a software solution.

EarthQuake

SnowInChina wrote: »

imho ndo2 can generate an AO from your normalmap

Not the same thing as proper ao.

cptSwing

EarthQuake wrote: »

Xnormal has an option to ignore backfaces, this prevents shadows from floating geometry. Max can do something similar I think, but even if you're using max/maya, you can use the SBM exporter and render just AO in xnormal.

this, basically.

nb.: in xnormal, enable 'ignore backface hits' within the AO properties, not just in the general baking settings.
In max i assume you'd set FG to pass through the floater objects, and disable shadow casting (least that's how i manage my HP clay renders with floaters). Don't bake AO in max though, so just a hunch.

ajr2764

Yea I was going to say that exploding isnt really going to help with the floater issue. Well I dont own max and never used it, mainly maya/modo. I have ndo 2(trial version) and have tried the normal to AO a while back but yea it didnt look correct at all. Im going to try to bake the pieces that are using floaters in xnormal and composite the two in photoshop.

EarthQuake

Why not just bake the entire thing in xnormal? Just seems like excessive time spent to composite different bakes, especially when you'll naturally get slightly different results out of XN. Would be better to just have one consistent map. Also, XN is really fast.