Adjusting cage - RTT vs. xNormal

danshewan

So, having finally got my machine to a workable state, I'm trying to test-bake some of my environment assets for the scene I'm working on.

Right now, I'm testing a simple paneled floor section, complete with bolts. However, adjusting the cage is proving quite frustrating, as the bolts are being excluded entirely from the bake. Here's the mesh, with the cage:





So, seems to me the obvious thing to do would be to adjust the cage to encompass the bolts. However, I've got to admit that I've never really had to adjust a cage extensively manually, and trying to adjust the faces to include the bolts ends up being even messier, as the adjacent faces of the cage are pulled too far away from the neighboring surfaces - so I thought I'd try the same thing in xNormal:





However, actually positioning the verts of the cage to include the bolts in xNormal seems like trying to write with your foot. Is there a better way? Would it be best to raise the faces of the cage the bolts are 'sitting' on to be planar with the raised surfaces?

I'm trying to nail this workflow down, as to be honest, it's been difficulties in baking that have dissuaded me on past projects. Is there something I should be doing differently with the mesh itself? Or something else to do with the cage that's not immediately apparent to me?

I've tried to keep the low-poly as close to the high-poly as possible (even if it means a slightly higher poly count) to try and achieve cleaner bakes and really grasp this whole thing, but I can't shake the feeling I'm missing something or doing something fundamentally wrong that's giving me headaches.

Any suggestions or pointers? Thanks in advance for anyone's input, and for everyone's patience.

samgriffiths

Make two bakes, one that works for the surrounding geo and one that works for the bolts.

Piflik

Simplify the Low...a simple plane would suffice IMHO...

danshewan

Right - an exploded bake was my next thought, but wouldn't that require the low-poly to have corresponding bolt geometry in order to bake correctly? If that's the case, I'd begin the question the need for a normal map at all, given the simplicity of the model. I'd be hesitant to increase the complexity of the model purely for the sake of it.

I know it's not mandatory to normal map everything, but would creating a simpler normal map from the diffuse texture using Crazybump (or similar) be acceptable? By that, I mean is this sometimes adopted in production environments? Surely something like a hardwood floor would benefit from this approach, as opposed to actually modeling each and every board? Or am I totally wrong? :poly136:

Bleah

You probably know far more than me on this, but what I think samgriffiths meant was to bake the bolts on a seperate texture then copy them into the floor mesh's normal map in photoshop? And thats assuming you want this to be a flat tiling texture with no mesh?

But that still leaves you with the problem of not knowing how to fix the cage. And as for using crazybump on a diffuse map, from what I've read its acceptable for flat textures, but I imagine you will get better results modelling and baking for most things.


PS I've just started high poly modelling and baking today after much reading, so dont believe everything I've said, sorry if I'm spreading bad info