YET ANOTHER Xnormal baking problem!

Artaekos_inactive

Hello again!

well I've been baking with Xnormal for a little while now with great success 90% of the time or so, but not this time!



Look at that, on the inner side of the right side of the ancient gate! Baking anomalies, inexplicable baking anomalies! Now this is also occurring on the inner side of the left side, across from what you can see. These anomalies are only occurring in these areas and nowhere else, the bake is perfect everywhere else!

Here's my cage setup in Xnormal



I've noticed that I only get these kinds of results whenever I am baking something that has an inner facing part with normals/faces pointing in the opposite direction from the majority of the surface area of the asset.

The backside and bottom of the low poly/cage is open with no geometry, as these will be merged into the ground and a wall, but I don't think that's the issue. I tried baking with a blocker plugged into the cage in those spots, no difference.

The last and only thing I can think of is.. do I need to place a plane between the arch here. Are the inner sides of the asset projecting details onto each other?

Help me before I die.

PyrZern

Have you tried inflating the cage in that area a bit more yet ?

Artaekos_inactive

And that didn't work either. Despite everything I've tried (baking triangulated, baking quadrangular, using blockers, checking on and off random settings in Xnormal) I keep getting the exact same results with these projection errors on the inner sides of the archway.

Artaekos_inactive

I've looked very closely, the cage is more inflated in the affected areas than a puffer fish on crack cocaine...

Bartalon

The cage determines ray cast distance so there shouldn't be any issues of portions of your model interfering with other areas unless your cage is clipping into itself, so adding a plane is not necessary.

Personally, I would recommend making your cage inside Maya. xNormal works fine and all but in my opinion it's just faster and easier to work with using your native modeling software.

To make a cage in Maya: Duplicate your LP and rename this mesh so you know it's the cage, then choose Edit Mesh > Transform Component. Pull out by the Z axis until your cage encapsulates your HP. I usually assign a red color to my HP before I pull out the cage so I know the cage has covered everything. If you find your cage covering 99% of your model but you have to pull out an unreasonable distance to get the remaining bits, you can manually tweak vertices with Transform Component or the move tool. Generally you want your cage to stay as small as possible. Extremely inflated cages can cause baking issues due to inaccurate ray casting.

From there, export your cage model and then in xNormal, right click on your LP model and choose "Browse external cage file" to load it in. Bake as usual.

Artaekos_inactive

Bartalon wrote: »

The cage determines ray cast distance so there shouldn't be any issues of portions of your model interfering with other areas unless your cage is clipping into itself, so adding a plane is not necessary.

Personally, I would recommend making your cage inside Maya. xNormal works fine and all but in my opinion it's just faster and easier to work with using your native modeling software.

To make a cage in Maya: Duplicate your LP and rename this mesh so you know it's the cage, then choose Edit Mesh > Transform Component. Pull out by the Z axis until your cage encapsulates your HP. I usually assign a red color to my HP before I pull out the cage so I know the cage has covered everything. If you find your cage covering 99% of your model but you have to pull out an unreasonable distance to get the remaining bits, you can manually tweak vertices with Transform Component or the move tool. Generally you want your cage to stay as small as possible. Extremely inflated cages can cause baking issues due to inaccurate ray casting.

From there, export your cage model and then in xNormal, right click on your LP model and choose "Browse external cage file" to load it in. Bake as usual.

Thanks, I will try that

Artaekos_inactive

Still the exact same errors in the exact same places. Fuck it, this happens so infrequently that this time I'm just going to retopologize and re-UV the inner geometry there. What a weird issue, the joy of 3D.

Artaekos_inactive

Which reminds me of a trick I have up my sleeve for retopologizing that I had forgot about. Using Zremesher in Zbrush to achieve a reasonable amount of quads (around 3-4k tris for this stone entrance), you can then use transform constraints in Maya 2014 to suction wrap the low poly to a decimated high-poly reference mesh of about 200-300k tris.

Artaekos_inactive

Turns out baking in 3DS Max solved all of the issues completely (surprise suprise right?)

redhonour

This is too late, but I once had a friend with this problem, but in Max

What worked was increasing the size of the low poly instead of the cage for that bake

I've heard that Xnormal can have problems baking if the mesh scale is too small, so perhaps that could have been it?

Anyway, that's all academic now I suppose. Glad you got it solved and good luck!

Bartalon

redhonour wrote: »

This is too late, but I once had a friend with this problem, but in Max

What worked was increasing the size of the low poly instead of the cage for that bake

I've heard that Xnormal can have problems baking if the mesh scale is too small, so perhaps that could have been it?

Anyway, that's all academic now I suppose. Glad you got it solved and good luck!

Ah, Yes! I always forget to suggest this because it's a setting I never have to change anymore. My scale is set to 50 for everything so problems like these never occur.

Artaekos_inactive

Interesting stuff! I'll have to keep an eye out for that the next time I bake