xNormal AO issues

Nadesican

Hey all! I'm working on a model with intent to put it into a game engine (though It's more for practice then anything) and I'm having trouble generating good ambient occlusion maps. The maps themselves generate just fine, but  there's significant artifacts in the shadowed areas of the mesh, and it seems that the details of the ears has been projected through it and on to the other one. Is there a way to fix that in xNormal?

FourtyNights

Are you using a projection mesh (also known as a cage)? It's a duplicate of your low poly which is inflated to encompass your high poly.

Nadesican

I wasn't, but after trying it I can say for sure that it didn't help - it made things worse. If it helps any, I noticed that the artifacts on the ears are also in the normal map. It's like I have a smaller ear on the ear.

Bartalon

Your ray distance is too high, causing geometry to project onto other parts.  A cage will definitely prevent the problem you have here if it is set up properly.    It overrides any automatic or default ray distances and only projects as far out as the cage mesh goes.

Nadesican

It took a little bit of doing, but I made a cage and it worked! Well.. kinda. Now there's some wierd mirroring going on now, and I'm positive I didn't have symmetry set up when I mapped these UVs. Any ideas? The rest of the map is near flawless, so I'd love to get this fixed.