[Bf-gamedev] Texture Baking Maps - Proposal

[Piotr Adamowicz]

On Thu, Oct 31, 2013 at 4:48 PM, Paweł Łyczkowski
<pawellyczkowski at gmail.com> wrote:
> I think it would be better if each bake map had a low-poly and highpoly
> object selector, with the option to select more than one. This way the user
> would be able to rebake maps without selecting the proper objects per map.

For simple bakes having one low-poly per map is enough, but in my
experience this is not usually the case for production models,
particularly when dealing with scifi hard surfaces, or characters with
complex clothing.

Typically you'll have several low poly objects that share UV space,
and for each of them you want to pick which high poly objects are
visible. All these low-poly objects should bake in a particular
(controllable) sequence and append their pixels onto a single map.

The sequence needs to be controllable because of so-called floating
geometry, where one separated element in a mesh will sometimes overlap
another in UV space and you want to make sure the floats come out on
top.

In addition, different maps typically require different high-poly
sets. A typical example would be a character's head in a helmet - for
the normal map, you only want to bake the actual skin. But for the AO
map you also want to use the helmet visible because it affects the
lighting.

Dilation should occur only after all the objects have finished baking.

Right now all this is usually done by laboriously baking map after map
and combining them in an image editing program.

So I think having bake settings per object, per map is a fantastic idea.

>
> Cheers
> Paweł Łyczkowski


-- 
Piotr "MadMinstrel" Adamowicz
padamowicz at gmail.com