Maya 2018 Transfer Maps crashes

KoolKat

I just recently installed Maya 2018. I am not able to bake a normal map using the Transfer Maps option. It does not work. When I click the "Bake and Close" button, Maya 2018 freezes and then crashes. : (  Now, it's nothing on my part or my Mac computer, because I go into Maya 2017 and do the whole process of creating my normal map; I save it and close it down; then after I open that same file in Maya 2018 and do the same process of creating the normal map again, it crashes!  Please help me resolve this problem; hopefully it's not an Autodesk glitch.

sharpened

Well, thanks for the head's up at least.. I'll be sticking with my good ol' 2017.  Strange that it works with 2017 on the same file, I've had mine crash occasionally when I'm super high-poly, this makes me think it's a glitch.  

This might be a good time for you to check out xNormal (http://www.xnormal.net/) for transferring normals, I think it's slightly quicker than Maya's 'transfer maps'.  Don't be fooled by the second-rate website and weird interface, this is a super powerful tool. You also get map converters (Normal to AO, etc) in xNormal, which can come in handy if you don't have something like Quixel for this.
 
I've also heard very good things about Substance's normal baking tools, but haven't switched from xNormal.

Maybe someone else with 2018 can chime in to tell you if there's works--sorry I'm not that guy

KoolKat

Well, it turns out that baking with Transfer Maps works as long as you don't bake it as a Targa file (tag). (An Autodesk glitch) I believe all the other file formats work; I've only done .tif and .jpeg and they worked.

Also, I came across another problem with the bump map attribute settings.  Once you turn on the texture mode in Maya to see the normal map on the mesh in the viewport window, there appears to be a shadow over the mesh as you rotate the camera, which can make it difficult to edit the mesh.  The solution is under the “File Attributes” in the attribute editor of that file that is used for the "Bump Mapping." You will see that “Color Space” has “sRGB” set. Changing that to "Raw" will eliminate the shadow on the mesh. In the Maya 2017 version, I noticed that the “Color Space” has “Color management – OFF” set with it slightly unhighlighted; in other words, it’s not even turned on.