Baking with Average Normals using a Cage?
polycounter lvl 3
I have a bit of a question,I bake with painter usually with avg normals so I will smooth the low with one group and bake with the high, but I wanted to know about using a cage for this. Normally if I used a cage it would be for non avg normals where I make my hard edges seams.
In painter if I select cage it grays out the checkboxes. Does this mean I cannot use a cage for this?
Or if I have the cage like the low poly with one smoothing group it will avg based on the cage with the same effect but granting me with the ability to bake objects close like fingers and not use the ray distance feature?
In painter if I select cage it grays out the checkboxes. Does this mean I cannot use a cage for this?
Or if I have the cage like the low poly with one smoothing group it will avg based on the cage with the same effect but granting me with the ability to bake objects close like fingers and not use the ray distance feature?
Replies
Quoted from the docs.
If enabled, computes the average normal of a vertex to know in which direction to send rays during the mesh matching process of baking. If disabled, the rays will follow the original vertex normals of the mesh.
It affects the direction rays are cast, not the normals of the mesh itself
When you use a cage, rays are cast between the mesh vertex and the equivalent vertex In the cage so it's affecting the normals in the same way and the two things can't happen at the same time.
So cages do the same thing, it's just added complexity to have manually controllable distances on a per vertex basis. Good for exactly like the situations like tight in the fingers.
I could test it of course as baking an object using one or the other will have a different result on edges to see if it actually works or not, but I'm trying to be 100% as to why it does this and if I'm not allowed to use a cage to direct the rays for averaged normals.
If the custom cage mesh has only modified it's vertices based on an averaged vertex normal, then the cage has what the averaged normals tick box would do built into the mesh already.
Am I getting this right?
in the best case smoothing on the cage is ignored.
I wanted to know because I only used cages prior when baking with non-averaged so I wasn't sure on the approach for averaged as I thought I was stuck using the ray distance sliders as opposed to having a cage.