Rendering floating geometry in maya?

biofrost

I have a directional light set up and casting shadows disabled on the geometry that is floating but when I render out a picture it still is very obvious it is floating above it. Is their a step i am missing?

Sonnhalter

Are you completely positive you have it turned off?

biofrost

Yeah it was off, I think it might of had something to do with final gather being on, at least to me I still see a slight outline but its much better(could just be because im really tired)

mdkai

I think you are misguided what you see there is not a shadow but simply the reflection of your object.
Try to follow pipeline to like modeling, uv, shading, lighting, rendering.
Otherwise you may have trouble to pinpoint a certain problem !

In the second image it looks like the mesh is inverted (normals) but it's hard to tell from that angle...

ceebee

Floating geometry isn't particularly for rendering, it's for baking maps. If you're rendering it you will always get that light difference because it is physically closer to the light. Also, if you plan on baking that into a mesh make sure the indent isn't at a 90 degree angle or you'll get crappy results in your normal map.

biofrost

Just be be sure I understand this right, I always want my floating geometry to be straight up or flat even if the surface is at a angle?

Rick_D

floaters should align to the geometry they are floating above.

if you were to do a test render using th emethod you described you would see that it would be completely wrong.

Mark Dygert

Normally you want it parallel to the surface. What he's talking about by the indent at a 90 degree angle, is this, you need to slope the sides of your indent so they capture better than if they where straight.

The red lines are rays that will be cast down onto the surface when you bake a normal map. Notice the rays aren't hitting the sides of the indent. If your lucky the rays might be angled slightly and you might get a few pixels of the edges but not as much as you would if you sloped the edges.





To really make sure it captures well, you can bevel the edges a bit.

biofrost

Thank you it already looks much better this way. Not sure why I had it with no indent before, I did the method you posted for a tile texture I was working on, guess it just slipped my mind.

lloyd

some nice pics there Mark