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Cavity Map Baking from Hi-Poly to Low-Poly

I have a hi-poly mesh object and a low-poly mesh object. The low-poly one is UV-mapped. I created a cavity map material in Cycles for the hi-poly object and I want to bake the color onto the low-poly object. The problem is that when I try this all the areas where the hi-poly mesh protrudes beyond the low-poly mesh get occluded and don't register in the bake.

Hi-poly and low-poly objects overlap like so:

Overlapping hi-poly and low-poly mesh objects for baking

And here is the problematic result:

Color data in the bake is being blocked by the hi-poly mesh

My Cycles bake settings:

Cycles bake settings

The material node setup of the low-poly object (bake target):

Bake target material node setup

My Cycles cavity material (node setup and result on the hi-poly mesh):

Node setup of Cycles cavity material

Cycles cavity material render preview

One thing I tried without success was to enable double-sided normals in the Mesh Context options. Is there a better way to do this, or maybe some obvious solution I'm missing? Thanks in advance.

Update: Fixed!

Here is the result after applying lemon's answer, just to show for comparison:

The updated fixed result. Problem solved!

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  • $\begingroup$ You could try to give a bit of 'ray distance' in the bake section. If not that, please add you file to the question to understand more the configuration $\endgroup$
    – lemon
    Aug 4, 2016 at 16:51

1 Answer 1

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This is a "symptom" of a need for 'ray distance' :

enter image description here

The bake casts rays around the meshes. If parts of the mesh you want to bake to are too far from the highpoly mesh, the bake will miss them.

Hypothesis : as you use here an emission material that can involve problems for parts of the lowpoly that are inside (not lighted).

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    $\begingroup$ You're right! I should have caught this. Increasing the Ray Distance value in the bake settings was the key. Problem solved. Thanks! $\endgroup$
    – Mentalist
    Aug 4, 2016 at 23:15

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