High Poly Baking - Can I Mask specific LP geometry to specific HP geometry in XNormal & Maya

DkuCook

Hi guys,

I'm currently working on a high poly hard surface model and I have a question about baking it. Years ago I was able to create a scene in 3DSMax that allowed me to assign specific sections of the lowpoly mesh, to only bake information from specific sections of the highpoly mesh. I'm not 100% sure but i'm sure this was achieved by using material IDs within Max.

Since then I have become very accustomed to Maya and Xnormals for all my modeling and baking. I was wondering if there was any way to duplicate this effect. I've included a very basic example below.

So I have a low and high poly model to bake.


I would like to set it up so that the cube only takes information from the cube and the sphere from the other sphere.

As a result I would be able to bake the Highpoly AO data into my maps without having any bleeding issues.

Does anyone know if this is possible using Maya & xNormals.

Thanks.

throttlekitty

Two ways to do this. First would be to bake in Maya via Transfer Maps, you can set the target and source, but can only bake one set at a time.

Or,  "explode" the meshes; Set a keyframe at the start for all objects in their start position, then move the timeline up. Now move each set of HP and LP objects away from each other, so the sphere and cube won't interact in baking, and set another keyframe here. You can either export these to xNormal, or combine the LPs and HPs and bake in Maya.

DkuCook

Got it, Thanks.