How to bake a character with multiple pieces?

Azaraen

Do you guy bake it as one grouped mesh?

I am using xNormals. When I use it, I bake out each item separately. Boots. Hat. Clothes. Skin.

But I was wondering, if there was a better way? Do you bake 1 whole low poly character with a whole high poly version?

David Wakelin

Personally, I'd bake it as you are; exploding it like you are tends to get better results for normals but for AO bake as 1 complete object..

Azaraen

oh ok! I thought I was doing it harder than it needed to be. Seemed like everybody was getting bakes pretty fast, so I was beginning to question my technique. And something as simple as that, I don't ever seem to see/hear/read from other people about their baking process.

Thanks for the clarification. I'll try that whole AO bake.

Bek

Depending on how your model is made, you might actually want to keep it exploded for the AO bake. For example if you have floaters on one side of your symmetrical model with mirrored UV's, you'll be baking the AO on both sides instead of one. Have a look at the polycount wiki for some examples

http://wiki.polycount.com/AmbientOcclusionMap?action=show&redirect=Ambient+Occlusion+Map

Teclis

If you bake it in 3dsmax you can define Materialid's for the lowpoly and highpoly and check in the bakingsettings to hit only the matching ID's. This way only for example faces with material ID 3 in the LP will get only hp information from the highpoly with matid3 in range. I wish this option was possible in xnormal

Chase

I second teclis' method

Dylan Brady

I usually bake almost everything at once because I model the loypoly as a single mesh.
So I would say if you have separate parts that need to be baked separately you should ask yourself if that's necessary first. Then do what the others here have mentioned.

Azaraen

Thanks guys! I'll be doing some experimentation tomorrow. I do most of my baking in xNormals.

Azaraen

I bake it all separately for the most part. I had layers of clothing that were multiple mesh, and trying to bake them together caused some undesirable bakes. Which was a bummer, but I luckily I modeled some clothing pieces together in the low poly, so I had less mesh to bake with. Thanks for the input!