I've had some great results from MightyBake and Handplane. I'm not sure there's a "best" tool for baking textures, but the two I mentioned are certainly feature-rich and work well.
MODO bakes are nice as well but can be a pain to setup if you are new to the program. I have heard good things about KNALD and Substance as well. Cannot go wrong with Max manual baking but it seems a bit archaic compared to all the new tools out there.
Been doing everything in Substance Designer. Great in a team setting for passing off files and it's easy to composite together multiple bakes with a pre-made graph.
I moved from max to xnormal and found xnormal to be very robust and produce way better AO maps. Just about to try out substance designer as it looks amazing.
Substance is now my main option, but I still use 3DS Max, since I can do a lot of stuff for Render To Texture in Materials, UV channels and Lighting that I can't do anywhere else.
It's surprising that people tend to forget that you need to import a cage (which takes that many more steps to generate one, export, import to XN) to bake out some maps. Otherwise, you'd be defaulting to a non-average bake which obviously isn't ideal.
I used to use XN, but do my Normals/AO in 3ds max (match by material id allows me to bake without exploding which is great). Rest of the maps are generated in Substance from those the normals alone.
I've tried several different bakers, and they all put out some very good results. However I've been using Knald almost exclusively for while, pretty much because of it's interface. It's just so sleek and fast and I really prefer that to some of the more clunky programs.
I've tried several different bakers, and they all put out some very good results. However I've been using Knald almost exclusively for while, pretty much because of it's interface. It's just so sleek and fast and I really prefer that to some of the more clunky programs.
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I still use xNormal for AO though
but I still use 3DS Max, since I can do a lot of stuff for Render To Texture
in Materials, UV channels and Lighting that I can't do anywhere else.
I used to use XN, but do my Normals/AO in 3ds max (match by material id allows me to bake without exploding which is great). Rest of the maps are generated in Substance from those the normals alone.
But i cant buy Knald hahaha
It works for most times but sometimes I still need to make a cage.