To bake to the model or to bake to a plane
polycounter lvl 9
As usual I've psyched myself out. Just to give you the breakdown on what I'm trying to decipher I have this carousel. The carousel has wood that repeats throughout certain areas, from the carousel floor to actual props. The best idea would be to tile this wood as it gives me more uv space for the rest of the asset to be textured uniquely. This would be especially helpful with the stairs where you don't want to have a repeating wood grain. If I were to texture the stairs and other wood areas uniquely I'd be wasting a lot of uv space so as to not have overlapping uvs to break up the wood repetition. That much makes sense.
Everything gets jumbled up when I try to decide if I should bake the wood to the model or bake to a plane, and if it will have an impact on the tiling of the texture. I believe I'm getting hung up on if the normal map from either process affects texturing. I've seen the second method used more frequently so I'm unsure what happens if I bake the wood to the model and still need the wood to tile.
To bake to plane
Or bake to the model
With the wood planks being baked to a plane I can select the faces that need to have the wood applied to it and as such I can apply a UVW unwrap to scale the uvs to match the wood size I need.
With the wood baked to the model I can select the faces that need to have the wood texture applied, but I can't scale the uvs since they've been baked, and the big no no is to never adjust the uvs after you bake. This means I'd be using that tiling diffuse in the same manner as a unique texture. Makes it pointless for the texture to tile then. Does that about sum it up?
Hopefully I've explained my qualms concisely enough so that maybe someone can offer me insight I'm not otherwise seeing. I've gone over this so many times my brain is now a pile of mush.
Everything gets jumbled up when I try to decide if I should bake the wood to the model or bake to a plane, and if it will have an impact on the tiling of the texture. I believe I'm getting hung up on if the normal map from either process affects texturing. I've seen the second method used more frequently so I'm unsure what happens if I bake the wood to the model and still need the wood to tile.
To bake to plane
Or bake to the model
With the wood planks being baked to a plane I can select the faces that need to have the wood applied to it and as such I can apply a UVW unwrap to scale the uvs to match the wood size I need.
With the wood baked to the model I can select the faces that need to have the wood texture applied, but I can't scale the uvs since they've been baked, and the big no no is to never adjust the uvs after you bake. This means I'd be using that tiling diffuse in the same manner as a unique texture. Makes it pointless for the texture to tile then. Does that about sum it up?
Hopefully I've explained my qualms concisely enough so that maybe someone can offer me insight I'm not otherwise seeing. I've gone over this so many times my brain is now a pile of mush.
Replies
I wasn't thinking of the wood as the texture so thats why i thought baking to the model would be ok. I was more thinking of the wokd in terms of another piece to model when in actuality its a big art of the texture. So by baking to the model I'm forced to texture the uvs where the normal map are on the uvs. Sound right?
Itd be like if I had two buildings that had bricks all over the buildings. I could unwrap them and texture them uniquely but I'd be using two different textures instead of the same one brick texture. You save on texture memory and draw calls this way.