Sure, it's not totally necessary. Just speaking my opinion :) The way I see it is that if I can get more control for the trivial amount of effort needed to use a cage, that's a huge plus for me. I've seen the technique you mention. Honestly? I let skewing happen and I'm happy with the results. I don't waste time with…
I've baked some complex (ish) meshes cage less in SP. Never really a problem as I usually bake synced. Also, I've seen an Interesting technique recently of setting up a graph in SD to blend averaged/non-averaged bakes to get the best of hard edges and non-skewed details from the respective maps.
Here is a pic of just one of the baked problem mesh. Since the normal map of this still came out yellow, with no other objects in the scene, perhaps the problem is unrelated to exploding. cage: hipoly: baked in xNormal. Just this 1 part baked, and nothing else: my xNormal settings: I've also attached this particular…
I believe your normals are inverted. Reset Xform and flip the normals if you are using Max. Nowadays I use substance painter to bake without cage, much easier. Would give that a try.
I would have thought inverted normals too, but OP states Maya and that the transforms are frozen and history deleted; which I believe is the same as resetting xform in Max. And I second baking in SP. :smiley:
It seems to happen mostly on meshes that are duplicated. in maya I've checked face normals, and they are pointing in the right direction. I've softened all edges and then hardened all the UV seams. I've frozen transformations and deleted history. All the meshes are triangulated. I've also made a cage. this was baked in…