Changing direction of cage normals?

TannedBatman

I heard it was possible to do this and Im wondering how, specifcally I want to bake the details of a high poly as viewed from a specific perspective, how would I go about making the normals of the cage face in a direction I want so the rays bounce in that direction. Im using maya and marmoset mainly.

Benjammin

Look under the Mesh Display menu in Maya. You can set normals by vector (set vertex normal), and/or rotate them individually (vertex normal edit tool). If you want to adjust an entire edgeloop, its much easier to add temporary edge loops to constrain them, then lock normals and delete the temp.

gnoop

I am not sure about Maya but usually cage normals  are irrelevant . It's cage vertex position in relation to low poly vertex counterpart  that defines rays vector  i.e direction of projection .     At least it was always that way before, not by cage normals.

Sort of a reason why  cages  had to have same vertex order as the low poly mesh.    So tweaking the cage vertexes position  was the way to  set specific projection angle.

TannedBatman

Benjammin said:

Look under the Mesh Display menu in Maya. You can set normals by vector (set vertex normal), and/or rotate them individually (vertex normal edit tool). If you want to adjust an entire edgeloop, its much easier to add temporary edge loops to constrain them, then lock normals and delete the temp.

Why has this not done anything? 


You can see despite the low poly normals direction it is still showing me the details as viewed from above for the most part. Is there something I misunderstand or should this not work? I also wonder if the vertex normals control how the rays shoot inwards. Am also correct in saying the cage is only there to tell the rays when to stop and doesnt bounce them back? Because I have heard the opposite.

Flmn

Create custom cage and move its vertices which above your particular detail into position, where their vector from original vertex to cage vertex will match the desired view angle. That should work. As @gnoop said, cage vertex position matters as they define vector of raycast.

TannedBatman

I actually ended up achieving the result using substance painter but im still not really sure why it didnt work in marmoset, it seems you cant change the length of the internal facing rays in marmo but not sure if thats it.

EarthQuake

In Toolbag, the mesh normals will be averaged rather than read directly from the cage mesh.

To fix these kinds of issues, you can use the skew painting tools in the baker.