I completely agree that floaters save time. And I really love them for it. But if you have the time to model it, if it is for a portfolio, will floaters be looked down on?
In xnormal there is an option to disable backfaces when rendering ao, this fixes the "shadow around the floater" problem by about 95%, you'll still have to manually do a few tweaks, but in generally it saves a LOT of time. I think you can do similar things in max by disabling shadow casting and enabling backface culling on…
I would guess you move the floaters to a distance greater than the Max_distance value, similar to how r_fletch_r explained here for the 3ds max mr method.
Oh i see what you're saying, adjusting the distance an object casts shadow? Still seems like simply disabling back-face shadow casting is a cleaner solution. As moving stuff around or relying on arbitrary numbers(floaters may be closer or farther away for instance) doesn't seem like a very quick way to do it on a complex…
If you're using the model to make a normal map, floaters save modeling time, no doubt about it. Only downside is it takes a bit more work to make an ambient occlusion pass, but it's still quite do-able. Some info. http://wiki.polycount.net/Ambient_Occlusion_Map#FMP
End result is all that matters, anyone who knows enough to be worthy of you caring of their opinion will know that using floaters well shows you have the technical knowhow to create good results while managing your time properly. Excessively complex meshes only show you're not very good at managing your time, or that…
This is great to hear you guys saying they're OK - somehow it was drilled into me early on that a single-mesh model was superior to one made in pieces so I've always tried to focus on that. Only recently have I been taking a second look at "floaters" (just learned that's what you call it). It's WAY easier for certain…
Right, max_distance is the shadow-casting distance. I guess if the mesh is really complicated, then sticking the floaters X units away might be troublesome. But the distance doesn't really matter, from the baker's POV. Just thinking aloud here, haven't played with any of this. Backface culling is a cool option too,…