Which max ray distance should I choose?

[proc24]

Hey there,

So I tried baking as Grantt showed us in the lecture. Now, when I was measuring the max ray distance I noticed a problem I come across. A good ray distance would be about 0.021 ± so the bake will get all the details from the scaly skin.

baking it will look like this then:

Ive noticed I got some errors here, thats because when I use this max ray distance the inner side of my hand will bake poorly, because of the distances there:

But when I set the max ray distance to the low value to reduce the errors I will loose my details of the scaly skin:

Is it bad to proceed with the 0.021 max ray distance bake from below? My thoughts on that where if the inner hand has some errors in it it wont matter, because you wont notice too much anyways, but loosing details on the shoulder skin will be visible.

Thanks in advance!

[FedPete]

@proc24

Is it bad to proceed with the 0.021 max ray distance bake from below?

No! because it depends on the project (how you created stuff).

[proc24]

thanks for the tipp! If I may extend my question in here, do you know how to get around this problem? As in how would I create the normal map for meshes that have a high amount of problems like this where there are body parts that require a higher max ray distance and body parts that require a low max ray distance? Bake the textures seperately for each body part?

[NP5]

Experiment, try other values. I doubt many ever bother with the measuring Grant does.
Also Extrusion, the parameter next to Ray distance is much more useful and important.
Ray distance often can be left at zero when using that. Read up on some other posts here in this section on ‘black bits’ problems in baking.

Those deep parts of hands will not bake well whatever you do, but they will not really show or be noticeable.

Were both HP and LP smooth shaded? Bake looks very angular.