Material ID Projection

BrendtheCow

I was watching 3DMotive's Baking Normal Maps - Tips and Tricks this morning, and Alec Moody described Max's Material ID Projection for normal map baking. It sounds pretty sweet, but I can't seem to find a Maya/XNormal equivalent (it's for work, and work doesn't use Max, so I'm stuck). Does anyone here know of a good Maya (or XNormal) alternative that they wouldn't mind sharing? Google has failed me!

m4dcow

Explode the mesh. Keyframe the objects in normal position, and then move the corresponding bit so they don't intersect anything else and set another keyframe.

BrendtheCow

Yeah, that's what I currently do, but it takes more time than turning on a button . It also means I have to comp together the exploded/unexploded versions of the occlusion bake. I'm just looking to speed up my workflow a bit with this .

Thanks for the reply, though!

Ace-Angel

Animate the exploded/unexploded frames and export each one maybe? Or use an older save with exploded and unexploded states? Or make a copy of the mesh and exploded that?

EarthQuake

I bake ao from the lowpoly, unexploded. I move off any bits that need to animate. I usually do this with the simple AO tool in xnormal.

I also tessellate the mesh one time(without smoothing) and then you have to blur the results a little(I usually copy the AO layer, heavily gaussian blur it, then mask) otherwise it bakes in some of the shading(not sure why). You may find some more accurate way to bake the low ao, but I find this helps a lot, just throw this in with your regular high ao and you're good. You get "double ao" in some spots but its usually not noticable

BrendtheCow

I'll give that a try, EarthQuake. Thanks

Hang10

I comb my HP and LP and detach matching elements into unique groups and assign a material Id from 1 to 4, any elements that touch another get separated and that way just hide each mesh when baking. No need to move parts around.

Keeps the scene tri count lower, no need to move parts and can make adjusting cages of tucked away elements easier to adjust.

Bigjohn

Yeah, it's a super useful feature that, as far as I know, only Max has. I'm not sure why other programs don't support that. I know you can export an obj or fbx with material-IDs out of Max, so it sounds pretty simple.