xNormal Cage/ray distance issue

#1

I am having a serious issue with normal mapping using xNormal.
This is not my first attempt at normal mapping so I am pretty stuck on why this is not working with my work flow.
I sculpted in Zbrush. Retopo done in Topogun.
Polycount is around 4k.
I tried to create normals in xNormal with a cage and got these results.
With cage

without cage(ray casting distance 2.0 but distorts the casting)

Model does have significant amount of details and pours that are not being projected into normal map.
Cage and Low poly model (triangulated because I read it might help but it did not and gave the same results)


Ive tried using multiple tutorials for xNormal and nothing has worked.
Please help. Thank you.

#2

The top normal map is actually a “Local” or XYZ normal map and not a result of using a cage or not, however you are getting correct result, simply change the type of normal map to tangent space and you will have a somewhat clean bake. Note that your high poly model is quite tame in terms of details and could be drastically improved.

For the “no cage” option:

Increase ray casting distance to 10, see what happens…because right now it seems the rays don’t travel far enough. Note that bumping the distance too high will also have a detrimental effect, sometimes it will travel too far and start baking details from parts nearby (between the pants for example, is a guaranteed glitch to happen with surface so close together).

Also triangulating meshes is due to the fact that exporters might handle normals/edges differently than your 3d software (sometimes they think for themselves and flip edges around) the reason you want to triangulate is to “lock” the state of the model so it matches your baking source. After the normal is baked you can’t modify your model’s geometry without breaking that 1:1 match.

#3

It is a tangent space map. The option is selected in xnormal when baking… Im not sure what to do…

#4

Did you setup the cage inside of xnormal or did it come from another app? (A cage is a duplicate of the low poly mesh that is offset)

If you answered no to the question above then you need to learn how to do so.

Did you also try to increase the ray distance with the no cage option?

#5

I made the cage in Maya which is something ive done and has worked before. I just installed xNormal on my new desktop and for some reason its not working properly. It doesnt matter what ray distance it is, everything is coming out looking like object instead of tangent space. Just frustrating that its not working on this computer. I have already tried to reinstall it as well.