Methods for baking complex models?

CJE

Hey guys,

I'm wondering if anyone out there has any good methods for working with complex models when baking?

I'm currently working on a character model for a job that has several dozen subtools, and I'm finding it very difficult to setup the cage for baking.

I'm using material ID's for all the seperate peices, but the problem I'm running into is having to manually adjust every cage point. Because of all the different submeshes, I'm required to go in and manually adjust every point on every area of the model.

As you can imagine this is quite painstaking and frustrating.

I'm wondering if anyone has any good methods for working with complex models that might save me some time in my workflow.

Thanks!

CJE

Sorry, please move to Technical forum.

Thanks.

Kitteh

Explode all the parts on the low and the high before projecting and baking? Never use ngons in your low poly, either, as Push makes verts go the wrong direction in your cage.

Xoliul

As far as I know, if you have an object that is complex by itself (so you cant solve it by exploding), then all you can really do is tweak the cage for until it's right. That's why baking always takes the longest for me, our of all steps.

BradMyers82

Well, you could use ray distance, with either 3ds max or xnormal, but you probably will want a cage for best results.

Anyways, if your using 3ds max, one trick is in the projection settings, export you cage (it will create your low poly model where the cage was) and edit your exported cage, instead of the cage itself. The major advantage to working this way, is you have the benefit of all the tools you would normally have with an edit poly object, where as in the projection modifier dialog and cage, you are very limited. If you do this just be very careful to not actually change the geometry in any way, that means no cuts or deleting faces etc. as this will mess up the vertex order.
But, if you use the exported cage model, you can get that all setup nicely how you want it, and when you finished, simply import it by going to your projection modifier, and picking the cage model to import. Racer's AK tutorial covers this in detail, if my explanation isn't making sense to you.

Hope this helps, And yeah, setting up cages sucks doesn't it? But if you approach it the right way, you can save yourself a lot of time.

CJE

BradMyers82 wrote: »

Well, you could use ray distance, with either 3ds max or xnormal, but you probably will want a cage for best results.

Anyways, if your using 3ds max, one trick is in the projection settings, export you cage (it will create your low poly model where the cage was) and edit your exported cage, instead of the cage itself. The major advantage to working this way, is you have the benefit of all the tools you would normally have with an edit poly object, where as in the projection modifier dialog and cage, you are very limited. If you do this just be very careful to not actually change the geometry in any way, that means no cuts or deleting faces etc. as this will mess up the vertex order.
But, if you use the exported cage model, you can get that all setup nicely how you want it, and when you finished, simply import it by going to your projection modifier, and picking the cage model to import. Racer's AK tutorial covers this in detail, if my explanation isn't making sense to you.

Hope this helps, And yeah, setting up cages sucks doesn't it? But if you approach it the right way, you can save yourself a lot of time.

Hey thanks Brad, I'll try exporting the cage, it sounds like that might be the way to go, I never knew that was possible.