Exploded Mesh Not Baking Properly in XNormal...

Zepic

I'm having a problem with an exploded mesh not baking out of Xnormal correctly. I've moved the pieces far from each other but I'm still getting rendered artifacts from distant pieces.

Any ideas on what I might be doing wrong?

Zepic

One weird thing I've noticed, when I re-exported out my low poly, the overlapping artifacts vanished. Does anybody know why that would happen? Is this a bug with xnormal?

tristamus

What I do in this case is bake things separately. I mean, I export each model individually first as an OBJ, then import them all into xNormal at once, but only have 1 at a time checked when baking. This prevents any errors, and I just compile them into one normal map later in PS. Yes, it takes longer, but you'll avoid this problem completely.

Who is the girl in your avatar, she is beautiful

EarthQuake

tristamus wrote: »

What I do in this case is bake things separately. I mean, I export each model individually first as an OBJ, then import them all into xNormal at once, but only have 1 at a time checked when baking. This prevents any errors, and I just compile them into one normal map later in PS. Yes, it takes longer, but you'll avoid this problem completely.

Who is the girl in your avatar, she is beautiful

If you're going to go through the process of exploding the bits, this isn't just slower, but a complete waste of time. Really I would highly suggest not doing this in any situation, its always going to be slower, and the only situation it would avoid any sort of problems is.... when you've got something else screwed up in the first place, like the OP had.

Just set up some quick keyframes for your exploded bits, this will save a massive amount of time and require no combining in photoshop etc.

Zepic: Perhaps something messed up with your raytrace distance, cage settings, etc in xn?

Zepic

Thanks for the replies.

Thing is, I'm still getting artifacts but a different type now. All I did was re-export out the low poly.
Any ideas?

Zepic

Okay,
I've done some detective work and noticed that when I change my smoothing groups on my low poly, I get different types of artifacts.
The first normal map I posted was with several different smoothing groups applied.
The second normal map I posted was with just ONE smoothing group applied to the entire low poly.
So, I'm kind of baffled at this point. Why is XNormal baking so drastically different with different smoothing groups?

Zepic

Update. -Fixed.
In case anybody else comes across this thread and is having similar problems....

I fixed the rendering errors by expanding my cage in the 3d viewer of XNormal.
I didn't realize you had to hit save meshes to keep the changes made to the cage
I thought they automatically saved when you closed the 3d viewer window. Got a bit confused there...

pior

You can also try using a bigger ray distance. It defaults to 0.5 (whatever that means!) but I know that with the mesh scales I use, based on the default Mudbox body mesh, bumping this number to 2 or more does the trick.