Is there a limit to XNormal's range?

Zepic

Hey Guys,
I'm trying to bake down a texture to a flat plane. Just some greeble bits. There isn't that much of a change in elevation from bit to bit, but for some reason XNormal seems to "clip out" at a certain point?

I'm not sure why this is happening.

I've made sure that my cage is definitely above all the pieces, both in Max and XNormal's 3d viewer.

I also ran the tangent base calculator, let it run for about 5 minutes. It doesn't seem to be helping.

Any ideas?

Nosslak

A bit too obvious maybe but have you tried just increasing the 'maximum frontal/rear ray distance' for all of your lowpoly models?

If you're baking heightmaps you'll need to use the interactive normalizer and drag the sliders all the way to the left and right respectively as it'll otherwise clamp the heightmap at some arbitrary points.

passerby

@Nosslak the ray distance settings aren't used when a cage is used, since a cage is a more accurate way to do the same thing.

Jet_Pilot

Is your plane in front or behind what you are trying to bake?
the plane should be in front of the bits OR your cage needs to be pushed in front of your bits

Zepic

Thanks for the help guys.

@Jet_Pilot. My cage is in front of all the greebly bits. I even reset my cage in XNormal. Same thing happened. Still couldn't figure it out.

In the end, I just ended up using the Render to Texture option in 3ds Max. Worked perfectly. I will say that the Render to Texture options in Max 2014 have improved quite a bit. (haven't used them since Max 2009).