Topogun bakes

warxsnake

Hey guys

I'm currently trying out Topogun baking as a replacement for xnormal, mainly for the speed and quality. The support forums look dead.

I'm getting great results and super clean normals and AO, however, even with a cage, it'll bake hard edges into anything that is smoothing group split.
Sorry I can't post images, I'm at work. Let's just say the same source files (LR and Cage) give me perfectly smooth results in xnormal along SG splits.
Any way, it just looks like its ignoring my cage? Not sure.
The workflow is Load Reference->high poly. Load Scene->LR obj. Set Cage->Cage obj. Use cage (inner)

EarthQuake

Try averaging the mesh normals (setting everything to 1 smoothing group in max terms) for the cage and re-exporting. Its possible its taking the cage into account but also pulling the mesh normals from the cage for projection direction.

warxsnake

Yeah I tried that before (1SG on the cage) and the normals came out as if I was baking the LR with 1SG. So weird. I'll try again with another asset.

warxsnake

Hmmm. Another asset, same result. :[

Wow, ok. Heres the tooltip when highlighting the cage slot:

"Note that when loading an .obj file in Topogun as a scene, the .obj's original normals are lost, and the mesh normals are smoothed. A custom cage would allow you to keep the original normals giving you better control..blablabla"

What the hell? Why? lol