That's technique #4 EQ discusses in his example. I personally feel like handplane is the quicker and better way to do that, because it doesn't only work on certain areas on a model, or with certain smoothing groups.
I'm not sure what you mean by prefer cage meshes? All the example meshes here were baked with a cage. Do you mean you prefer to tweak the cage manually to try to reduce skewing?
I think it should work on any hard surface model. Or not? Also, I'm wondering why you would ever want to do it like on the second example on this image. Those internal edges inside the supporting seems unnecessary to me as it would give you the same result with only the actual support loops next to the mesh edge.
I've got a question about it. I've had some pretty good results by splitting my low poly mesh up as a lot of loose elements. In 3DS Max it's pretty easy to select smoothing groups and detach them an element. This creates split vertex normals and the correct cage on seems I need it. Like this: It gives me this: The edges…
Correct me if I'm wrong, you know a lot more about this stuff than I do but I think MoP was talking about editing cage normals? Which can be changed without editing the low poly normals? In max you move the cage verts around and the projection modifier and it alters the angle of the projection without changing the normals…
As you may remember, in my tests i was able to get Max's cage to follow the normal direction perfectly on the first use of the push function, but after that it seemed to go another direction. I have no idea but in the Max help file, the only example problem they have for normal maps is solving skewing on the top of a…
Awesome, thanks for that! @EQ: Thanks a lot for the write up. I realize the examples for the problems of the tessellation method are just that: broken down examples and caveats to look out for. But I'd say that in many cases like the cylinder, you might have set up smoothing groups for the lowpoly anyway and could do a…
What about this idea, using the bolts/box example in the first post. What if you scaled the bolts down do they were super flat but still retained some of the their slope information, say about 5 or 6 times just to the point that they would fit under a cage that worked well with the edges. Then, in a program that allowed…