Mostly black AO from XNormal

Steve Schulze

Gah, what am I forgetting here. Something dumb. Baking Ambient Occlusion in XNormal is resulting in this:

I'm getting loads of ray misses, but I don't have flipped normals on either my high or low res mesh.

Clues?

Bal

How is the normal map baking out? (if there is any).
Try loading both high and low in the xNormal 3D preview, to see if they are placed correctly.

Steve Schulze

Normal map is all screwed up too.

I don't get it. The UVs are correct. The normals are facing outwards. The models are the same scale - I re-exported them out of ZBrush to make sure.

DarthNater

Try not using the cage once, and set the ray distances pretty high and see what happens.

Steve Schulze

Cranking the ray distance up to 1, 10, 100 and 10000 doesn't seem to have any noticeable effect.

DarthNater

Stupid question but have you upgraded Xnormal lately. They just released an update to fix some obj errors they were getting from Zbrush 3.5?

seforin

I had something like this happen a LONG time ago


Do the following


import you low to max

Reset X-form

Reset pivot 0,0,0

after that is done export your low


Take your high (this might chug bad but hopefully your rig can handle just a import)

Do the same (do not convert to editable poly leave as a editable mesh since this might cause more issues if your rig isnt strong enough to convert it even)

So reset x-form , 0,0,0

Rexport it

After that see if your bake works,, I had issues not to long ago with something from 3.5r3 where my mesh and low even though the same exported models from zbrush were off for some reason and needed to be handled this way

throttlekitty

I got something like that the other day when I accidentally exported the cage out as the lowpoly mesh.

Shogun3d

Sounds like you need to freeze transformations, reset xform, etc. You can also utilize the 3d previewer in xNormals and check to see if you're models are overlapped.

Ben Apuna

I was having some strange bake problems just last night after installing the latest version of xNormal. They weren't the same problems you are having however the fix might be worth mentioning.

I went to "Settings and examples" then used the "Restore default settings" button. After that all was well.

Good luck, I hope you get it sorted out.

Neavah

Are you using zbrush R3.5?

I find every now and again I have issues with the scaling on export and import from and to zbrush - that being it exports really, really tiny obejcts. I've gotten some really fucked up results in xnormal, because my high poly was so tiny.

I had no idea what was causeing it until I imported both models into max and compared the two.

good luck

Gav

Don't forget about the ray distance calculator in the Tools tab as well, it'll help you figure out the max numbers you need to get a good bake.

kurt_hectic

I dug the topic because maybe it will be helpful for someone.
Remember to check "ignore backface hits" in AO settings: