I think my problem with cages is here : you said "pretty much". If I'm using vertex normals I'm sure I get exactly 90 degress since I make sure that my normal are perfectly perpendicular to the face I'm baking on (in this example of course). :\
Thanks for the feedback guys, I really appreciate to get fresh point of view ! :) I made a quick update on my cage bake to avoid any confusion : So in this case, you guys would simply tweak the vertex of the cage to fix the projection of the cylinders ? That's what I'm not sure to understand, if you keep an global cage or…
So I would like to ask a question that I'm asking myself since a very long time now. I'm a Maya user and now experienced to deal with vertex normals. I have also read some things here and there about smoothing groups and I think I understand them too, even if I don't use them. However, I really don't understand what is the…
I'm not sure what make my examples confusing sorry... :( I have already read it a lot of time, but I have hard to time to apply the logic of some parts with the usage of a cage. This is exactly what I'm saying ! :) When I say I don't use a cage, of course I'm talking about using an external geometry shape to drive the…
Aren't you essentially adding more geometry anyway if you start beveling your cube and splitting the vertex normals to that extent? Personally I think different meshes call for different methods. Some can easily get away without a cage, which can make making one seem like excessive work. If you dont need one, you don't…
My cage wasn't enough pushed away to capture all the geometry, this explain why the top of the cylinders are cut. However the "problem" that I'm talking about it that with a cage the projection vector deviate and make the cylinders inclined rather than just baking the top of them. As I'm saying above, tweaking the…
But why would you want to do that with your HP geometry in this scenario? Texture bakes with perpendicular topology result in poor normal maps. It's the same reason why you wouldn't model a rivet, or a hole, or a screw head, etc. at a perfect 90 degrees from a flat surface. To get more detail you would want to 1) conform…
Ah, I understand better now. Personally I haven't needed to tweak vertex normals at all (not manually anyway), and I've actually had incredibly higher success with the use of cages compared to not, in both xNormal and Maya. My work flow leaves all the UV mapping, smoothing groups, and texture baking till the very end.…
So the basic issue you have when not using a cage/averaged projection mesh with hard edges is that you will get gaps in your projection, which I'm not seeing in your example there which makes me wonder exactly what you're doing. This thread covers the issue in a lot of depth:…
Yeah so there are basically a few different methods right: 1. Use averaged normals on your entire mesh, no hard edges or custom edited normals. Using a cage or not has no bearing on your baked result(unless you manually edit your cage, which works differently per app, hand editing the cage/envelope in Maya for instance…