Nope, Softimage but the process of building the cage is the same in all applications. The push operator does nothing more then moving all the vertices along their corresponding surface normals, so selecting all of them and moving them along their normal does the same like a push operator.
You're SURE those verts are welded? The issue on the left looks like unwelded verts and the one on the right looks like your cage wasn't pushed out quite far enough to encompass the high poly entirely. But, of course, I could be wrong. And likely am...
I almost get the impression that normal maps were meant to be a stepping stone to the "next gen" ... just a quick hack to get more detail until we could push the amount of polys we wanted. However, years later we're still waiting on that magical rendering solution and we're all still using the "temp" hack. :)
If the tangent basis is synced between the baker and renderer, and you don't push it too far, it's totally fine to not split every last edge. Practicing, you'll get a feel for how much you can do with synced tangents and where you can push harder. The problems you can run into when pushing it too far: - Imprecision due to…
Not sure. Should I? I literally just clone the Low Poly mesh(with UVs, Smoothing Groups and all the junk that may be cloned in the process) and use Push Tools/Move vertexes along normals to increase the cage's volume a tad. I thought only the cage's vertex information were important in the baking process so I never…
If you're using modo you'd be insane not to use PipelineIO for this. If you think the exports from modo are causing trouble; check in xNormal's viewport to verify that the low/cage are correct. If you want to export stuff manually you can use Fararer's vertex normal toolkit to set soft/hard edges manually. Basically to…
I have a problem that I run into when creating a my encasing lowpoly/cage over multiple highpoly objects. Well the issue is about angles no matter the highpoly involved I guess. So here we go: So as the two main shapes joins I get this "star" corner as seen in the image above. When pushing out a cage in this case will end…
I'm glad you posted to ask for help with this as the last thing you should ever do it edit your normal maps in Photoshop to remove stuff like this. It opens a huge can of worms & can really mess your bake up :) For the custom cage, I use this method. * Triangulate your LP mesh using the Triangulate modifier set to Beauty.…
Yes adding a "lowpoly" baked AO pass is usually what I do, is it the same quality? Its worse in some ways and better in others. It can be more accurate to the actual shapes of the lowpoly for instance, if you have a very round cylinder in your high and not so many sides on your low, the lowpoly baked AO can be better.…