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X-normal help please
April 28, 2011 - 4:44pm
- 1743 reads
Hi I am having problems with my normal casting. I get some weird areas. My model is really big too. I tried various scales and casting differences. The calculate distance tool gave me worse results. I checked that there are no overlapping uvs. Is my model too low res perhaps? I am new to this so am not sure what I am doing wrong. It looks like it's casting the button on her hood onto her chin.
I haven't used a cage before. I basically am taking my high poly from Z brush and a low poly I rebuilt into X-normal and creating the normal maps that way. i have the average normals on for my low and have tried various settings along with the tool that gives you the ray distance. I will have to look and see how to work with a cage. I am taking a class with Katon Calloway on cgworkshop and he didn't use a cage on his video tutorials so have no idea how to! Yet... 
I highly recommend the class though. It's awesome. I just have to get these pesky normals projected so I can move on to texturing. I have had to learn X-normal and Topogun for the class and am impressed with both.
I had the same problem and there's not much help here about cages. For a model shaped like yours and mine you can't just scale up the LP for a cage, you have to go into your modeler and scale up the individual parts so they cover the original model. I spent two days building a cage to have it come up error, spent more time on the cage than I did with the model! I ended up blurring out problems in the original Normal Map and using it anyway. You could try reposing your model so the hands face back/front, and neck is slightly tilted back. Then you'd have to adjust or rebuild your low-poly to match. I wish you better luck playing with a cage than I had.
Building a cage shouldnt be taking that long...Most of my cages take 10 mins or less. All you need to do is use the push modifier in max (or similar in Maya etc.) and push it so it covers the HP and then tweak any parts that are intersecting.
All the cage is, is a copy of the LP that covers the HP and controls ray distance. If you create a new mesh then it wont work because the topology isnt the same... nothing else major is going on
You can also edit the cage in xNormal very easily, though tweaking is a little more awkward.
Any idea how to make the cage in Maya? Do I just take the low poly and make sure it encloses it and leaves a bit of distance?
Yea you could do that
Just make sure you dont add or delete new faces or verts and that the UV's remain the same.
If you used the LP as base mesh for subdivision then you don't need a cage and neither to setup ray distances. Just use the MatchUV feature.
Any idea how to make the cage in Maya? Do I just take the low poly and make sure it encloses it and leaves a bit of distance?
Clone the mesh and move/extrude verts/faces until you cover completely the HP. Don't remove/add verts/faces. It's VERY important.
Save the mesh and use it as external cage file.
Other option: use the xN's built-in cage editor.
Thanks everyone for the help so far. I did not use the low poly as the base for my high res. The low poly is a retopo from topogun. The high res doesn't have uv's even. I will try to build a cage by tweaking and see how that goes tonight.
I used the tutorial to figure out the built in cage editor in X-normal and I got the best results so far! I did separate the head from the rest to make it easier. The occlusion map did get a little burnt out in spots though.
I used the tutorial to figure out the built in cage editor in X-normal and I got the best results so far! I did separate the head from the rest to make it easier. The occlusion map did get a little burnt out in spots though.
In almost all cases you are much better off using a projection cage and not raycasting as the results are much more accurate.
Explode any parts that are overlapping or are causing issues and then rebake with a cage, ensuring that in places like in between fingers etc. the cage isn't intersecting with itself.
Hope that helps
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