Baking phone cord on a tube. What am I doing wrong ?

Raphael_Bouch

Hello, here is a high poly phone cord mesh I try to bake on a tube for the low poly. But no matter what I try I will always end up with artifacts, is anyone experienced with this and could provide some insight ?

Thanks in advance !

Fabi_G

What program are you baking in? Does it allow limiting front and rear distance of the rays? If not you could be baking some distant part of the cord into the texture. Of course the effective texture resolution has to be sufficient too, and ideally the UV borders align with the pixel grid.

A different approach would be to create a tiling cord segment on the texture sheet (or separate) and wrap low-poly UVs to that.

Raphael_Bouch

Fabi_G said:

What program are you baking in? Does it allow limiting front and rear distance of the rays? If not you could be baking some distant part of the cord into the texture. Of course the effective texture resolution has to be sufficient too, and ideally the UV borders align with the pixel grid.

A different approach would be to create a tiling cord segment on the texture sheet (or separate) and wrap low-poly UVs to that.

Hey, I'm using Marmoset Toolbag 4 and really for the sake of test bake It just occupies the whole space of a 2k texture. I also have a nanite mesh already done and textured so I'd like to avoid redoing something from scratch if possible. Does Marmoset has ray length settings ? Which software is more appropriate then ?

Fabi_G

I'm still using Toolbag 3, and I don't believe there is a way to limit the distance the ray goes, @EarthQuake surely knows.
You could test with a straightened cord (or just a short segment), to see if that's the issue. When using with a straightened mesh, a curve deformer can be used to pose the game mesh (ideally an instance?).

EarthQuake

There is no way to limit the ray distance. A good way to handle this type of case is to put in a blocking mesh in the high poly. This can be a copy of the low poly that you shrink down a bit. If you assign it a unique material you can use the material ID bake to make an alpha mask too.

Raphael_Bouch

EarthQuake said:

There is no way to limit the ray distance. A good way to handle this type of case is to put in a blocking mesh in the high poly. This can be a copy of the low poly that you shrink down a bit. If you assign it a unique material you can use the material ID bake to make an alpha mask too.

Fabi_G said:

I'm still using Toolbag 3, and I don't believe there is a way to limit the distance the ray goes, @EarthQuake surely knows.
You could test with a straightened cord (or just a short segment), to see if that's the issue. When using with a straightened mesh, a curve deformer can be used to pose the game mesh (ideally an instance?).

I in the meantime got the idea to try within substance painter and ray distance indeed solved it. And to say I was cracking my head for a whole week for this issue

Now the trick of adding a blocking volume you suggested EarthQuake worked as well, but it's an extra step and a real annoyance knowing that painter, and that good old xNormal supports ray distance.

Regardless thank you both for your time and help !