Baking in Maya. Weird detail projection issues.

PattyWhacker

So I'm using Maya to bake out normal maps and of course I'm having trouble. For my project, I'm making a robot character. When I bake the high poly model to the low poly model, I get some ugly results. The biggest problem I'm running across are weird projection issues. For reasons I don't understand, I'm seeing details being projected onto pieces I don't want. For example, I have pieces that cover other pieces. When I bake the model, I see the shadow of the outer piece projected onto the inner piece. Other times I have details that were meant to be baked onto one piece, baked onto a nearby piece. If any of you know of anyway to get around these issues in Maya, please let me know.

musashidan

You're experiencing ray projection intersection. You need to 'explode' the pieces and bake. A google search should give you loads to get going

PattyWhacker

I did a little research on "exploding." Does that mean moving the pieces so that they are not touching and then putting the pieces together after the bake? I think I'll try that idea. However, I'm difficulty moving a high poly piece to the low poly piece. I've read this technique about using keyframes when exploding to make the process of placing the pieces back together easier. When I try to set up a keyframe for a high poly piece, the program crashes. I'm able to load the high poly mesh, and the entire mesh is about 1.2 million polygons and the piece that I'm trying to set a keyframe is 52,000 polygons. Is this too much? Should I try to decimate the high poly mesh to a lower polycount? I don't really want to lose any detail if I don't have to.

Magihat

If you are having crashing issues with when trying to keyframe it then that might be the case but Maya is kinda weird with performance when it comes to highpoly models. When exactly does Maya crash? You could try to hide the parts you aren't moving before trying to keyframe.

musashidan

You don't have to keyframe. Save out a separate file 'explode_bake.file' or whatever, move the pieces away. Bake and apply maps to the original unexploded mesh. You're only moving geometry in world space so uvs are completely unaffected.