Baking probs

StJoris

I've been baking lots of things before, so it's not really new to me, this thing had me jumping up and down and through hoops, I don't know what the hell I did wrong.
I have this unsightly area of ray-missed I can;t possibly explain, it doesn't go away. This is with a new low-poly and unwrap hoping to fix it, the one before had even stranger bands of ray-misses.
Some info, similar result cage/no cage. The cage fits well. It is all smoothed on 1 smooth group so no broken normals. I tried it in Xnormal but that came out just as funky. This is in max2009 with scanline renderer.
There has to be some setting I overlooked.
Ideas are much appreciated

Eric Chadwick

UVs overlapping at all? When you used the Projection, did you reset the cage and push it back out again?

StJoris

no overlaps, mirrored parts are offset by 1. I did exactly that with Projection, reset and push back out.

Eric Chadwick

In the Unwrap window, Face mode, Select menu, Overlapping Faces?

Also, this looks like the render window, not the output file. Did you check that?

Eric Chadwick

Also in the same menu, Select Inverted Faces (or somesuch, Max isn't open right now)

StJoris

Yeah I did check the output file, it looks just as screwed up. Good one on those select features, haven't used them before, I'll keep them in mind. Select inverted faces yielded some results. I'm entirely sure how to fix it though, I tried flipping those faces, but that doesn't make it any better. When I look at it with edit normals on, normally they point out, but after flipping they are turned inside.

Eric Chadwick

That's your problem, too many modifiers. Collapse the stack, and try again. Don't pile on modifiers unless you're animating with them or doing some other fancy tricks.

It's a good habit to get into, add whatever modifier you need, then Collapse All when done editing it, before adding another modifier. Special mods like Skin, Turbosmooth, etc. shouldn't be collapsed usually, but Unwrap, Edit Normals, etc. should.

Mark Dygert

Looks like your cage is inside your high poly? Try resetting your cage, and pushing it out so it encloses the high poly.

stimpack

I had a prob like this before. Has to do with my material being 2 sided....or lack of 2 sided. Cant really remember.

StJoris

Thanks guys, yeah those additional modifiers were just temp there as I wanted to check what happened when I'd inverted those faces.
Hey Vig, nay that was my lowpoly in that screenshot, the cage is not shown in that screenshot, but it was fine, it encompassed it all.
On first sight not much good, as flipping them did exactly what it says, flipping. As strange as I think it is, baking them with flipped faces like this, eventhough the cage is half-ass backward yield almost perfect results. Got a new and old normal map screenshot in here to check out the difference.
Thanks for the help guys, I'd never could have find out without knowing that inverted faces trick. I'm really curious though why and how this would work the way it does, it goes against my nature to willingly create inwards normals and fubar cages.

*edit: just tested it, it does work somewhat ok, but it's inverted and it's missing the floating geo.

demoncage

yeah, normal map seemed to turn out ok. usually when i run into that inverted faces problem, i do a "reset xform", and it inverts all the normals inward on the model. then if you select all faces and hit "flip" in editable poly, everything should be oriented properly on your uv's.

i'm sure that probably makes no fucking sense, but whatever.

i'm erik turner, and i approve of this message.

StJoris

I found it out haha, damn, silly stuff. A part of the highpoly was inverted, the ring you see, that's why it worked when I inverted only that part. Mystery solved!