Xnormal Thickness map wierdness

JohnnyRaptor

Hi folkes

im trying to render out a thickness map in xnormal but getting some really strange results.

I seem to be getting some sort of cross projection on the mesh (weird wavey lines) but they also appear on areas that have nothing to cross project on (top of shoulders, face, front of legs etc)

See the image below for the wobbly lines,

Iv tried lots of different ray distance settings incl auto generated, manually meassured in maya and so on but no luck to get rid of these.

jogshy

Have you setup the cage?

JohnnyRaptor

hmm no, thats the only thing i didnt try actually.

i just assumed if the other maps bake correctly with the ray lenght settings, the thickness map should work too.

will give it a try tonight, just in case.

cdrose

Did setting up the cage work? I'm getting this issue too.

JohnnyRaptor

Will test when I get home n post my results

JohnnyRaptor

result with a cage,



no better unfortunately,

BARDLER

Not sure what is going on exactly with xNormal, looks like a projection issues...
Knald can do those maps now with even more tweaking and features than xNormal will get you.

Ace-Angel

I suggest reading the Help file that comes to XNormal, because Thickness maps for XN are one of the weirdest thing ever, none of the values make sense, it requires a VERY clean setup (clean triangles in some cases, none in other, reseted normal/xform, perfect cage, etc) and can be really fidgey like that.

Hopefully, that is one area that in the future will be simplified.

If you have access to Max, you should check up on it's Texture baking Maps, one of them is called "SubSurface" Map, and it will bake out exactly what you're looking for, although if you want to change the contrast and such, you will need to use PS.

@Bardler: That's actually pretty cool, but once Knald goes Pay, it's less then optimal for free tool users ;P

JohnnyRaptor

Just tried it in the new knald at work and damn, right on the spot straight away!

Late edit but good for future reference, but I did try Max's subsurface map and it seems to calculate the depth from the point of the active viewport camera, which gives you a biased map.

So yeah in the end my best result was using Knald.