Exploded mesh for bake in Mudbox?

Sir Apple

Hey guys.

So I've spent the past two or so weeks deeply immersed in Mudbox. I've mostly been doing tileable textures.

But now I'm working on getting better at sculpting details in hard surface type models. Most all of which have many parts to them. And this is where I'm confused.

In 3dsmax, I have the lowpoly mesh, and I have the hipoly basemesh. Then I simply bring the hipoly basemesh into mudbox and do detailing. But what I don't understand is, how do I then explode the mesh for baking with the lowpolys cage?

Am I missing something simple here (I assume I must be)? Any insight regarding this workflow would be awesome, because I feel stupid

For the record I most always bake out of Xnormal, and thats what I'm trying to do here.

Best,
Apple

onionhead_o

one method you can do is to do the exploding in 3dsmax for both low and high poly export it out as obj/fbx. Import into mudbox as a sculpt layer. That way you can toggle it on and off.

From my experience, mudbox doesn't bake well with really low poly meshes especially sharp angles. You could add bevels to the low poly as a workaround. It could be just me, but i often get a lot of skewed detail for hard surface stuff. But for stuff like rocks and organic stuff, mudbox does well.