XNormal - Cage Breaking based upon SG
polycounter lvl 12
Hey to all,
Does anyone know a cheap and effective way to split up the cage in Max based upon smoothing groups, so when I import them in XNormal, I can bake them out nicely?
I had alot of hard edges in my model, hence the reason I would like to be able to break my cage around the smoothing groups.
Or if anyone knows a way of Chamfering the edges of my model post UV, that would be also great.
Does anyone know a cheap and effective way to split up the cage in Max based upon smoothing groups, so when I import them in XNormal, I can bake them out nicely?
I had alot of hard edges in my model, hence the reason I would like to be able to break my cage around the smoothing groups.
Or if anyone knows a way of Chamfering the edges of my model post UV, that would be also great.
Replies
But what you can do is to automaticaly assign smooth groups based on your uv island via textools. It's just a simple click. Do that on your low poly before you make the cage.
I could do that OR bevel my edges, but I have already UV'ed my models and any bevel will send the UV's flying off and breaking in less then stellar ways.
The last option for me would be to setup manually support loops for my mesh, which is what I have right now, but I was hoping for a cheaper solution in that regard.
Are you planning on overlaying a broken cage normal map onto the averaged cage map in order to have both edge shading and unskewed details? Wouldn't that still result in the need for a lot of editing?
Thanks again, will try, fingers crossed, it respects the SG breaks in the rays.
However if ther's a better, less time consuming method i would like to learn about it aswell.
No, not with ray distance. Xnormal only does averaged projections with cages.
On a side note, I can't think of any circumstance where using a split projection on a model is a good thing. Yes, it can clean up detail skewing but it breaks everything else and there are other ways to fix problems. Photoshopping two bakes together is a bad idea since you will need to bake all your maps twice and then composite. If you need to rebake something (which happens all the time in a commercial setting) you will have to repeat all that work. Even worse, if another artist has to do the rebake they will have to figure out and then repeat that process.
How do you deal with skewing then? I haven't figured that out yet with cages. Especially for the very fine detail it's a problem for me. Also when i use floating geometry the PS composition method works best for me personaly. But i'm really curious to learn about anything that saves me time and improves my workflow.
But I don't have nDo2, so I can't do anything about that, I will put in support loops at this point honestly.
Generally this is something you should avoid.
If you're getting skewing etc there are a lot of different things you can do, from re-thinking your geometry to cutting in a minimal amount of extra verts around the skewed detail.
But yeah, xn will do this with the default ray distance method, but it is really not recommended to use. You can do it directly in max too by going into the projection options and clicking "use offset" as well, but really, you're fixing one problem by causing a bunch of other problems.
Also, this should be required reading for anyone who is having waviness/skewing issues: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=81154
^Also this, a million times this.
The reason I was asking this because the 'outer' parts of my rifle, where the player will not being looking at can be baked out cheaply to save time and resources, but details like screws can still look wrong, especially at glancing angles, hence the reason non-hero pieces, I would like them to be baked out cheaply instead of taking care of them manually, especially for edge bevels that they won't be seeing (the parts which are up close and personal, got the royal treatment).
As for the 'add extra vert in the middle of the face', that's a technique I heard about and saw at 3DMotive, but most of my models are boxy, so I might as well cross-hatch the flat plane, but that would be time consuming too, even more then support loops in my case, unless you know some secret script/way to cross-hatch a vert in the middle of my flat boxy plane for a clean bake which I'm not aware of quickly and efficiently.
As for the two bake process, I do it his way; one of the LP is set to Ray, the other Cage, I bake both of them out, then I select the non-skewed one, inverse select on a uniform color background, shrink my selection with small feather and voila, done, cut and paste, bevel edges and inner detail. You can automate the process in PS with action, as long as you know how much Padding you put and how much you need to subtract the details.
I really try to think it all through from the high down to the low though, so that you're not adding in supporting bevels unnecessarily, you integrate that sort of thing into the design with some big fat bevels or something.
As far as cutting in an extra vert... takes like 2 seconds to do so in modo with the cut tool, not sure what you're expecting or doing if this would be time consuming, its certainly a lot less time consuming than doing multiple bakes etc. Even just the bake time for two bakes, not counting combining them all etc, that can take hours in some cases....
There are some more things you can do, like making sure your screw floaters are as close as possible to your lowpoly(sometimes even enlarging the low a SLIGHT amount). Generally making sure your floaters are as flush as possible, and not too tall(the angle is more important than the depth) will result in less skewing(try it out with a shallow floater and a deep/tall one).
Also, there shouldn't be any reason to bake your floaters in a separate pass, in XN you can simply disable the backfacing AO, which saves tonssss of work. Again making sure floaters are as flush as possible so you avoid your cage getting too large and "collapsing in on itself" goes a long way to getting by with a single bake.
The one on the left is the one using traditional support loops (or broken cage previously) the right one is one cut and vert in the middle.
That's something I always do, most of my models have that 'bevel' look to them, but after a while it starts getting boring, sometimes I would like to model something which has a 90* bend and see if you can tackle such an issue head on and stop relying on bevels, you know?
I'm using Max, and I'm not sure if it's a bug on my end, but when I use the Cut tool, it connects to the next vert in the most awkward way possible, giving me weird bends, and as you can by the image, even if I take care of it manually and quad/tri my vert in the middle to avoid n-gons it still has a weird skew going on. Maybe I'm stupid and actually didn't understand how the cut and vert method for baking is supposed to work?
Also, while I do use floaters occasionally, most of my work is sculpt based, so my baking is very much traditional (low poly -> cage -> high -> bake) without most of the therebetween steps.