3ds Max to xNormal for many separate objects

Alex262

Assuming that I have a scene with 20+ exploded low poly objects each having a high poly and a cage, which is the fastest way to bring these in xNormal for baking? The UVs are all packed on a single UV map. Currently I attach all the parts in a specific order and everything goes pretty well generally but when I need to make many small changes the attaching process becomes annoying.

I tried batch exporting each object but this would work well only if xNormal had a quick import function. There is a batcher that can do something similar but it renders a separate map for each set of objects and it takes too much to load xNormal and the objects 20+ times for each set; beside that I just want to avoid having to deal with more maps instead of one and I'm better off with my current attaching workflow.

Basically I'm looking either for a tool that magically merges all the lp/cages in a way that I won't get errors saying that the cage is different from the lp or a tool that automatically detects the batch exported lp/hp/cages following some naming conventions and imports them in xNormal. Is there such a tool/plugin/script/etc.? What would you do in a similar situation?

SuperFranky

If it bothers you to manually attach objects every time, you can easily get a script for batch attaching on scriptspot.com

Alex262

I tried a few but with each one the cage became "incompatible" with the low poly, the same result as if I just select all the low poly/cage objects and export them. Do you know any script that works for this case?

.Wiki

Why do you need to combine all objects when you bake? If they are seperate objects just keep them seperate as long as possible. xNormal should work fine with unmerged geometries.

Alex262

In xNormal is there any way to quickly load each separate cage for each separate lp? Or it just works manually? If I don't delete the lp/cages from xNormal's low def meshes list after I finish with a group it's very easy to create a mess with so many objects around. Is there any option to save the lp/cages from that list so that if I want to come back and rebake a group of objects I can quickly load all the cages that are already set up from the previous bake?

SuperFranky

You could take a look at Substance Designer. It's baker is really powerful and you can do rebakes of many objects in one click, your geometry is updated automatically.