cage is identicle

knak47

I have a large model with tons of smaller components the way I have to bake this is many separate bakes.I created custom cages for all the objects and have had great results with preliminary bakes. The issue is that now the cages aren't working when I am trying my final bakes which I will composite in Photoshop. I keep getting this error. Somewhere along the lines these cages, that were created in max, from the objects themselves, and are identical got disassociated with the parent objects they were created from.

Noors

Your custom cage has to be the exact copy of your low poly (not simply visually but in vertices indexation). You maybe broke the topology at some point by deleting a vertex or something. Make a fresh copy of your low poly and snap it to the old cage.

knak47

don't think that's the issue because I created my cages straight from my lowpoly and didn't alter them, mind you were talking 30 to 40 cages so I don't have time to redo them.I'm wondering if combining all the objects into one and then uncombining had something to do with reordering the vertex counts and maybe that would be why. If what you suggest is the solution, how do I go about snapping a ne cage to an existing one?

m4dcow

Combining then uncombining, would mess up the vertex order. I don't know max too well, so I can't really give you a solution though.

ghaztehschmexeh

I've found that even duplicating the low poly for the cage seems to break whether a cage will be recognised.

The way I do it now to avoid this is save a separate copy of my scene, expand my low poly, export it, reload old save, import cage.

Really stupid and inefficient method I know, but it's the only sure fire way I've been able to avoid this issue.

knak47

http://www.scriptspot.com/3ds-max/scripts/shrink-wrap-ms

Took some tweaking but Some of these worked especially when I...

Cloned lowpoly

Used Push modifier to get it close to my original cage, but made sure to make it larger.

Then applied the Shrink Script

Thanks guys

Noors

Yeah attach and detach reorders the vertices. Just don't do that on cages
Maybe the conform tool could have help too.
Glad you've found an efficient way to fix it.

kurt_hectic

Eh, I had the same problem I think that without option to export\edit\import a cage mesh that option is useless.

Has xNormal have the same problems?

knak47 could you post this script? It;s unavailable on scriptspot.