normal map baking cage help

Borx25

I have seen in some tutorials that it's not good to manually move the vertices of a cage, so all i do is duplicate the triangulated lowpoly and adjust a push modifier until the cage completely covers the highpoly, but there are always some parts or details of the highpoly that are further from the lowpoly so in those parts the cage is adjusted fine but in others is pushed a lot more than it needs to.

Should i manually move the vertices on those places it needs to be pushed more instead of pushing more the whole thing? in that case, that "move" should only be along the normal right, like push?
Also does it matter if different parts of the cage intersect? if you for example have two tubes in your lowpoly and have to push a lot the cages of them intersect.

i use 3ds max and xnormal btw.

thanks in advance.

SuperFranky

You should use Projecton modifier to create your cages, it's very easy to use. And yes, it's okay to manually adjust vertices on your cage, Sometimes simple pushing out doesn't really work, because the geometry works against you. It won't give you predictable results, tho.

Intersecting cages will give you baking artifacts, but sometimes it's nothing to worry about. You should test it and see how it works for you. But it's preferable to avoid these issues altogether by exploding your meshes before baking.

AdvisableRobin

Its preferred that you don't modify a cage in a production environment unless it is absolutely necessary. It'll just be an extra step that you or anyone else that gets your work might have to repeat.

If you are having lots of problems with intersecting cages then you may want to consider either exploding your mesh or creating a low poly that more accurately matches the high poly.

Borx25

thanks a lot, both, will try exploding the mesh and try to match the lowpoly better

EarthQuake

One thing that can help in terms of intersecting errors is to merge together parts of the lowpoly that don't move. I see this really often, people will model the lowpoly with as many mesh chunks/objects as teh highpoly, which doesn't make any sense (wastes uv space and makes bakes more complex).

Also in terms of editing cages, if you need to expand on mesh chunk more than another that is certainly a manual tweak you should make, if you get into adjust individual verts and things like that, thats re-work that will be very difficult for another artist to do if they ever have to work on your files so it should be avoided. If you get to that point its better to fix the mesh itself than try to hack it with the cage.