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hansolocambo
Known Participant
October 6, 2026
Open for Voting

Cage experimental issue

Problem with baking rounded objects (but this apply to many other cases).

Example with this Cactus Sculpt. 

Here is one layer of the upper flower _high, viewed from side and from above: 

Automatic cage (experimental), works amazingly well for tons of complex objects, but not for some simple ones like the example above. If I bake with Cage type set to: Automatic (experimental), it feels like the Max rear distance is infinite and catches anything behind faces. 

If I bake the more traditional way with a hand-made cage mesh, or with the basic Distance-based Cage type, it works perfectly fine: 

So basically, there’s an issue with Automatic (experimental) Cage type. The automatically calculated “Max rear distance” cannot be controlled by the user, and the one that’s calculated automatically seems to go indefinitely, baking everything on the opposite side of my polygons normals direction.

Of course there are tons of workarounds. But it just doesn’t feel right. Esepcially given how much of a revolution was the addition of this automatic cage system that saves hours of work on large environment scenes. If the “outer cage” inflation is automatically calculated for each vertex in order to bake perfectly everything (and it works so well!), then it should also calculate a distance on the opposite side of the normals of my high poly. To avoid the “inner cage” from going so crazy far away from what needs to be baked.

    1 reply

    Cyril Dellenbach
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    October 8, 2026

    Hello ​@hansolocambo,

     

    Thank you for your in depth feedback of the auto-cage. As it is mentioned in Painter, it is still experimental and we’re happy to receive this kind of feedback, so we can continue to improve it. I’m sharing your message with the team behind the feature.

    That being said, we’re currently working on features for the baking, and you should see more tools coming for the cage. I strongly advise you to take a look at the next release. 

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    Cyril Dellenbach (Micro) | Product Manager | Substance Painter