how can i make a low poly cage inside of maya that i can use in xnormal for baking maps?? thank you..

what program are you using for the high poly and NEX is a good one, tho it does have its bugs. if your making a low from a sculpted high zbrush also has some tools for retop but they are occasionally buggy and i would stray away from them for complex things.


-Woog

i would usually just apply some push modifier on the lowpoly and edit parts where i need to

Originally Posted by lefix

i would usually just apply some push modifier on the lowpoly and edit parts where i need to

Yeah, but that's for max right? My question is there any tool/command or any thing or any way that is equivalent to the tool modifier of max in maya. Thanks anyway.

• duplicate your model.
• select the original and place it on a display layer and make that layer a reference layer.
• take the duplicate model and switch to vertex component mode (RMB over model or F8 - i prefer F8
• select all the verts and hit "W" for the move tool
• either double click the move icon in your toolbar, or hold down W+LMB and select Normal for the axis (depend on which version of Maya you are using, W+LMB may have the "Normal" axis moved to Axis>Normal)
• move your verts along the N axis (blue,but may already be highlighted yellow) until the are outside your original mesh
• don't go too insanely far with it though, just a fair enough amount outside of the original model so there is still ample room for good raycasting, but not too far otherwise it really degrades the form of the normal map and flattens it out.
• then tweak any areas of the now created cage that are not where they should be, are overlapping, or are still stuck inside the original model
• delete the display layer of your original model, then export your meshes accordingly

VERY IMPORTANT! your cage must match the topology/vert order of your original mesh. If you change your original model, then you'll have to re-create your cage. If you try to change your cage to match your original model that you may have modified, then instead of working with the same model twice, you are now working with two entirely different models

two more things that help... switching on backface culling while you work, and assigning each model a different shader while giving the duplicate cage model a definable color and some transparency.

Maya actually has a built in cage system, tho i find it to be pretty buggy at times, all you have to do is go into the advanced options in transfer maps a click off "delete envelope after bake", there, do a quick test bake and it will create an envelope mesh that you can edit as you please.

Its worth noting that editing your envelope in maya isnt like max, in that all you're doing is editing the ray distance, not ray direction(in max you can move stuff around to try and fix waviness, doesnt really work the same in maya).

At the end of the day, i find all this cage editing business to be a huge waste of time! I would rather add some geometry to fix any projection errors, explode the mesh to fix any clipping issues etc. Setting up custom cages can mean a lot of work if you need to go back and make changes to the mesh(have to redo your cage) or need to bake in a different app.