Baking between legs (crotch are)

White_wizard

Any tips for baking in between trouser legs? I keep getting these white patches but not sure how to fix it.
a

oraeles77

looks like its detecting the normals of the opposing trouser leg.

im not an expert on organic stuff like this, but when I bake tight little areas like that I will distance everything out (I call it exploding the mesh, no idea if that makes sense) so I would move one of the trouser legs elsewhere (with its lowpoly as well)  just for baking etc.

White_wizard

Ahh i see, thanks for your response since its a small patch i decided to use the clone tool over it.

poopipe

This is why cage baking was invented.  Use a cage

SPYFF

two old technique:
1) explode the mesh as mentioned before: separate the lowpoly mesh into two different leg, splitted where at the UV seam. Also split the highpoly too.
2) I've seen this in a old tutorial: select the faces near the seam (both low and highpoly) and change the material ID-s. Then at the baking process, select the option which enables the baking on material IDs. That way you can select and separate the problematic areas, you dont even have to modify the default cage (which is really gentle with the normals)

apollo580

Honestly its very hard to get rid of all the imperfections when doing these sorts of bakes. What I normally do is just manually fix this. You could try creating a custom cage to get the perfect bakes but sometimes it takes a long time and IMO isn't worth the effort.

I use the method I learned from Marc Brunet. I try and get the best bake I can using the substance baker settings and once I get my results I take the normal and AO maps into 3D coat (You can use any program really), and fix the problem areas. I sample the colours around the issue areas and smooth out the results. It works really well, and usually the issues I find are in areas that are hidden most of the time anyways.

Check it out!

https://cubebrush.co/mb/products/1ztdpw/pbr-character-for-games

poopipe

Hand painting normals is poor practice in a professional environment - think about what will happen when someone else comes along and rebakes the model later. 

Building a working cage means your result can be repeated by somebody else if you're not there. 

oglu

In general i agree here with poopipe. But there are a lot of cases where its near impossible to get a clean bake with one go for AAA+ Games.
The complexity is rising fast. Even rebaking will take several days.

Neox

in what case does rebaking take several days? even the most complex stuff we handle, once it is set up, rebaking is a matter of minutes unless there are some really big changes going on, ie. entirely new UVs, tho even then the setup should take a few hours tops and baking should happen in a managable timeframe.
Sounds to me like either some really really really complex stuff, or bad planning and setup?

Mind to share in what case a rebake would take several days?