Crazy Maya Normal Map Issue

Isaiah Sherman

Hey guys,

I'm working on my first huge baking project right now. Not only is this the first time I've done Normal maps, but it was also the first time I've used Zbrush so I've had an extremely stressful past 2 weeks (deadlines ).

Basically I am baking an entire character for a game we're making for our senior Game Production Team in school. I wasn't able to get the results I wanted in Xnormal so I decided to bake each of the main pieces seperately in Maya and have had much less success than I was hoping.

I have run into a few issues with some pieces that I cannot fix.

I'll just post one at a time and see if we can work these out. If we manage to do it, I'll move onto the next problem


SO... problem #1. Here is a large JPG of the objects, my UVs, the baking options, and the results. I have frozen transforms, deleted history, centered pivot, and checked faced normals on both.

Please help!

Click the image to make it larger so you can read my bake options.

breakneck

not sure if this will fix it but here are some problems:

you can uncheck include materials, as well as the attach to shader tic box.

but i think its your cage search settings.
change the search method to inside the envelope along with the search depth of 100%

Isaiah Sherman

There is where my newbiness shines.... cages.

I understand cages are pretty much the low-poly mesh expanded to be larger to limit where the rays shoot. How do I tell it to use the cage, though?

And when I use a cage, I should have 3 meshes, right? Low-poly target mesh, high-poly source mesh, and my cage mesh, correct?

When I get that cleared up I will try it out. Thanks !

Isaiah Sherman

Good news! I think going with a cage is a step in the right direction. With not knowing what the hell I was doing, I attempted to make what I thought was a cage and it managed to fix the severe stretching noticeable on the one side.

However, other issues came up. But I'm going in the way I want to, so now all I need is someone to direct me to somewhere I can read about how to use cages for Maya's baking.

Thanks again Breakneck

Isaiah Sherman

HOOOOLD the phone!! I figured it out! The cage was everything and I Googled the info myself and figured it out.

I am so happy right now

breakneck

check this out:
http://www.paultosca.com/makingofvarga.html

EarthQuake

try unlocking normals on your low, and then use soften edge/set normal angle to soften them.

Isaiah Sherman

Thanks again, breakneck. Again you've supplied me with exactly what I was looking for. I actually didn't know I could manually adjust my cage after getting it as close as possible to just slightly tweak small areas.

Your info is just as important EarthQuake. I was actually going through a painful process of re-exporting my meshes and turning all their options off in order just to fix my inability to soften and harden edges.

Thank you both! You've helped me and my team out a huge amount

Whargoul

You also had the transfer set to UV space, instead of world (or object) space.

TWilson

Also UV better and use XNormal

Isaiah Sherman

Whargoul: Yeah, I fixed that and changed it over to World space... which opened up the whole useage of the cage entirely which has drastically improved my control over the baking and the look of the textures.

TWilson: I'm not exactly how I could UV "better." I used Headus UVLayout and there is little to no stretching in my textures around the entire character. I would use Xnormal if there were more in-depth articles to read about it. The stuff on the Xnormal website wasn't all that helpful. I love your work by the way