How to change my mesh to get a good cage and clean bake?
polycounter lvl 9
I'm having some issues with this mesh. It's only a quick test bake so far using Max 2013 with Toolbag 2 for viewing bakes. Smoothing groups are set from UV shells and the mesh has been triangulated before export and baking.
The baked result:
Wires (it's fairly low poly, maybe this is an issue):
Most of the bake comes out clean, but there's some ray misses going on and it's down to the cage not being able to envelop the problem areas properly.
Cage around the low poly, problem verts selected:
It may be difficult to see so here it is without the cage:
As you can see the cage is not able to push out in the correct direction without compromising another section. I could tweak the cage manually but it doesn't give me a perfect result and I'd rather get clean bakes without manual work, for reasons:
So I think that my errors are down to a lack of geometry. Maybe I need to chamfer some edges or cut in some new verts, but I'm not sure where to go from here. Hopefully someone can help me out.
Thanks
The baked result:
Wires (it's fairly low poly, maybe this is an issue):
Most of the bake comes out clean, but there's some ray misses going on and it's down to the cage not being able to envelop the problem areas properly.
Cage around the low poly, problem verts selected:
It may be difficult to see so here it is without the cage:
As you can see the cage is not able to push out in the correct direction without compromising another section. I could tweak the cage manually but it doesn't give me a perfect result and I'd rather get clean bakes without manual work, for reasons:
EarthQuake wrote: »Because every software hack that we do, cage tweak, every time we paint the "errors" out in photoshop, every time we do a bunch of different bakes and combine them, we must remember that:
A. The work must be redone every time we change the mesh.
B. The work must be redone every time your boss requests you to change the mesh.
C. The work must be redone by some other poor slob, when you're unable to do it and they're forced to, requiring them to entirely debug/rework your model back to an acceptable state, or attempt to preform the same magic voodoo dance you had to perform to get a good bake. - This one here is key, you owe it to your fellow man to properly understand this stuff.
So I think that my errors are down to a lack of geometry. Maybe I need to chamfer some edges or cut in some new verts, but I'm not sure where to go from here. Hopefully someone can help me out.
Thanks
Replies
It SHOULD give you a vert point on the outer edge and SHOULD keep your cage from collapsing. Right now you're asking that lone inner vert to do a lot of work at an extreme angle.
Also be careful when applying comments from other threads to your work. It's fine to tweak the cage to get good bakes, it can be just as much as a headache and roadblock if you never edit the cage and only fix errors with more geometry. It's all about balance and being able to predict what the results will be when you model. The better you get, the less time you spend tweaking and re-baking. Next time around I bet you look at a spot like that and know exactly what to do to get it to bake right and sidestep the whole thing.
Unfortunately I was not able to find any success using your method, but I was able to "fix" the problem using another method.
I detached the vertical sections as elements so that there were 2 verts in the problem area. Then the cage would be able to envelop in both directions. It's kind of a hack but it worked and the result looks fine.
Thanks again for your help though