Maya bake cages

gilesruscoe

In maya the envelope tool just does a simple push on the mesh and you get tons of overlap happening in the fingers and between the legs etc. Is there any scripts that add constraints to the cage tool so that it doesn't overlap things? Going through and tweaking verts between fingers is very frustrating, or is there any features in 3ds max or another program that yield faster/better results?

Cheers!

cptSwing

that's pretty much what it does in max as well. though you can select faces/verts individually and push them back in, for instance. xNormal also supports ray blockers of some sort, though i haven't used them myself.

haikai

You can edit the red envelope mesh with the caveat that Maya doesn't seem to remember your tweaks later if you need to rebake. I'd like to know if there's a better way as well, if anyone else knows.

Kind of a hack, but I tend to render 2 normal maps, one to accommodate tight areas, and one that works for everything else, and blend the two together.

gilesruscoe

Yea i know you can change the red cage in edit mode, but im looking for a script to adjust overlapping faces between fingers etc.

Two bake cages can work, but then there are still areas that dont quite work.

Pola

Maya can remember the bake cage, its a seperate mesh you can find in the outliner, maya will normally delete it after the bake. You can scale the cage in the bake window, there is a slider. You could create two seperate cages then remove the faces for each that you don't want and connect the two cages into one mesh to use for baking?

gilesruscoe

Does that result in the mesh having the same vertex ID's if you weld it together? From what i can tell, Xnormal is very fussy about meshes matching eachother.

m4dcow

You could just dupe your geometry and modify the mesh in vertex mode along the normals, this way you can tweak areas like the fingers so you don't get overlap, and it will be same vertex id, because it is just your mesh duplicated.

Make sure to move the verts along the normals though (change it in the translate tool settings), and you'll probably want to throw a material on there like the envelope to check for overlaps and such.

gilesruscoe

That sounds like a pretty good solution m4dcow, sounds alot better than fishing through geometry for stray verts atleast!