Baking Picatinny Rails

[thepuglife 30]

I've been trying to bake picatinny rails where the teeth of the low poly rails are separate elements from the main body, but cant seem to get a good result. I don't know if I' not setting the projection cage up right or what. 
I've searched the forums to see if I could get an answer but didn't find anything so if anyone could guide me on the right path for the proper workflow, that would be greatly appreciated.

Current projection cage:

 

[gfelton 84]

Have you tried making the teeth separate in the high poly as well?

[veles-zv 176]

its been awhile since ive used that god awful program which is more temperamental then badger... but is the cage the blue lines? if so they look very spaced out or maybe you forget to add the other teeth to the list? but anyway why are you making each tooth a separate object? to save a few verts? why not just make it in one single mesh... its much easier to work with then. general rule of thumb when you model something try to make everything which is a singular piece in real life like a milled or casted  rail like what is shown here, as one mesh of course there is exceptions which you might want to use at times, but generally this is how you should work. the low polygon model should always have the general silhouette of the high poly model.  

[warlord554 2065]

I'd separate the teeth from the main body, and always make your cage as close as possible to get the best bake.

[da12thMonkey 1943]

I discussed it with him on the Arma 3 discord last night.

 

I think he went with my suggestion of remodelling the teeth and rail as one continuous piece in the low-poly for the sake of making the cage projection better and baking it like that.

Then making the game-optimised version by detaching the teeth, and optimising the lower half of the rail by merging the verts where the holes were from detaching the teeth, followed by deleting the extra edges and these merged verts, so that the UVs disappeared and sewed together the gaps (or manually sewing the merged edges together in UV space first if you don't want to rely on the 3D software doing it automatically when the edge is deleted).

 

So long as the "corner" Verts/UV-points along the border edges remain in place and the unwrapping was done properly in the first place to ensure consistent texel density, the UV map should relax within the same bounds when interior verts and edges are being deleted; and the overall UV projection should remain the same even with the reduced face count.

Same way you would treat the UV borders when decimating the mesh to make resolution LODs really.

[Delta Hawk 1829]

I'd like to see screenshots of all of this.  Projecting in max is a kick in the nuts.

[thepuglife 30]

da12thMonkey's method worked perfectly. I would definitely recommend stitching the UV space first as there can be issues if you let the program try and do it for you (which I found out)

[Macser 776]

Delta Hawk: Projecting in max is a kick in the nuts.

 

Depending on the object baking can be a kick in the nuts regardless of the program. Some models play ball and behave nicely. While others just continue to fight ye. :D