Xnormal and Maya Baking Problems

Mirhale

Hey guys,

I've been using xnormal for some of my bakes lately and all seems well until i encountered a few problems regarding on this particular mesh, what bothered me is this little gap when i try to bake from xnormal as shown below.


I use maya and I've tried softening the normals, flipped the normal's face along with the use of backface culling (but this doesn't seem to be the problem since all the mesh' face are facing on the right direction) and unlocking it but it still gives that "hole" in between. This however doesn't happen when i bake my normal maps on maya using transfer maps, the result has a clean bake. (shown below) using envelopes



I wanted to know what's causing this error in xNormal as i've encountered this previously.:)

AdvisableRobin

Make sure when you export your meshes that you clear the history and freeze the transforms. Also try baking in xNormal with a cage, you can either create one inside of xNormal or Maya. Whichever works best for you.

jfitch

Pretty much what Robin said, you'll want a cage. Essentially thats what maya is doing, the envelope is a cage based on the low poly that it creates for you. If you use the 3d viewer in xnormal you can adjust the cage to make sure nothing from the high poly is peeking through (or you can do it in maya).

If you don't know how to do it in maya:

Duplicate your mesh, grab all of the vertices, and change the move tool to move along the normal, and push it out until you can't see the high poly, and apply that as a cage to your low poly in xnormal.

Good luck!

Mirhale

Ah, thanks fitch and robin!
Yeah I found this tutorial pretty helpful for someone who is also experiencing the same problem with caging.

I never knew there was more to xnormal than just calculating ray distance between the low poly and high poly obj meshes xD. Also is it a good idea to explode the low polys along with the high poly meshes first in maya before using the 3D viewer?