I have been using Knald a lot lately, totally loving it!. Doing a clean installation of the AMD driver fixed all the issues i was having with the viewport. However I'm only using it for test baking atm as its missing some features that I kind of need when baking whole meshes. -Baking IDS from exported materials, this is really useful when baking IDS -Match meshes by mesh name, this one is a time saver as you don't have to explode your mesh, just rename parts correctly so they match and they are good to -When I export a bunch of meshes on an fbx file it only loads one mesh, this is pretty annoying. I am really looking forward to see those features in the software, Im really impressed by how fast and how good the quality of the bakes is. Love the ambient oclussion.
Is there a way to stop the baker once a bake has started? I click the X in the corner of on the little popup progress bar but the bake continues in the background in the main Knald window...
I'm sure it's been asked before, but do you guys have any plans for a round corners shader type implementation for baking? Creating a fake chamfer on hard edges would allow for super quick bakes off mid-poly models.
Since the 1.1.1 release of Knald last month we have been hard at work
improving mesh processing and baking speeds in addition to fixing a few
bugs and adding some other new improvements to Knald. Enjoy!
What’s changed since Knald 1.1.1?
New Features, Improvements and Optimizations
Improved High Poly mesh loading & processing speed by an average of 25%.
Improved baking speed by by an average of 5%.
Added an option in the export tab to enable the saving of .ksf’s on user export.
Added various sanity checks to ensure HP/LP/Cage meshes exist when baking from a saved .ksf.
Updated tooltips.
Miscellaneous improvements and optimizations.
Bug fixes
Fixed an issue during acceleration structure generation.
We
really want to thank everyone for all the hard work and feedback
during Knald's development. Please do continue sending us suggestions & posting everything you
can!
Thanks, Chris Gilbert Knald Technologies
PS: I replied to a bunch of your questions in a prior post but seems like it's held up waiting for moderator approval - hopefully it goes through soon!
I have been using Knald a lot lately, totally loving it!. Doing a clean installation of the AMD driver fixed all the issues i was having with the viewport. However I'm only using it for test baking atm as its missing some features that I kind of need when baking whole meshes. -Baking IDS from exported materials, this is really useful when baking IDS -Match meshes by mesh name, this one is a time saver as you don't have to explode your mesh, just rename parts correctly so they match and they are good to -When I export a bunch of meshes on an fbx file it only loads one mesh, this is pretty annoying. I am really looking forward to see those features in the software, Im really impressed by how fast and how good the quality of the bakes is. Love the ambient oclussion.
Regarding baking IDS - Andy will have to chime in on this, sorry!
Mesh matching is on our TODO list - hopefully we will have some more specifics regarding this soon.
We currently only support one mesh per FBX, but this is something we have considered adding support for, I will discuss it further with the team.
Is there a way to stop the baker once a bake has started? I click the X in the corner of on the little popup progress bar but the bake continues in the background in the main Knald window...
Currently there is not - due to how optimized our baker is this is more complex than usual.
It's something we'd like to fix in the future but currently do not have an ETA for.
I'm sure it's been asked before, but do you guys have any plans for a round corners shader type implementation for baking? Creating a fake chamfer on hard edges would allow for super quick bakes off mid-poly models.
Andy will have to speak to this when he returns - sorry!
Thanks CGilbert. So one of the main reasons i ask for auto loading the baker as an option is when i load a previous settings file that i saved out with all my bakes set up it fails to fill in the high/low poly sections unless i load the baker first. it would be good that if loading settings from a file that it detects high/low info and auto loads the baker so it can fill in this info.
Thanks CGilbert. So one of the main reasons i ask for auto loading the baker as an option is when i load a previous settings file that i saved out with all my bakes set up it fails to fill in the high/low poly sections unless i load the baker first. it would be good that if loading settings from a file that it detects high/low info and auto loads the baker so it can fill in this info.
Ah makes sense - perhaps what we can do then is remember if you were in baker mode when the settings file was saved and restore the mode correctly during settings file load.
I can't make any promises right now - but I'll discuss it with the team and look into making this change in our next release.
I am still confuse about the license terms, the freelancer license mention non commercial use so i wonder if a single indie developer like me can use the freelancer license for commercial work yes or no?
I am still confuse about the license terms, the freelancer license mention non commercial use so i wonder if a single indie developer like me can use the freelancer license for commercial work yes or no?
Thank for any quick reply
Hi pixelquaternion,
The Freelancer license absolutely allows for commercial use (regardless of revenue).
The
EULA is a little more complex in terms of legal wording but
essentially the only stipulation for the Freelancer license is that to
be eligible for it you have to be an individual, or a single person
company and that person has to be the licensee. Other than that you can
use it for whatever you want pretty much.
I have a few feature requests / questions / bug reports. I know that some of these have already been mentioned, but I would like to re-iterate a few points.
-Lack of sub-mesh support. This is a complete show stopper for me. I work exclusively with CAD data and the model I am working on has thousands of sub-meshes which is the result of how the CAD data is structured. Baking maps for these objects individually is simply not an option. On top of that, many of the low poly meshes are fused (to save draw calls), but this means I have to fuse the same high poly objects as well. Added together, the whole thing requires an incredible amount of work, hence the show stopper.
-Match by name baking. Similar as in Substance Painter / Designer. The lack thereof is a showstopper as well because of the sheer amount of (sub) objects used in my model. Even if there was support for sub meshes, it would be pointless if it didn't came with match by name baking.
-Skewmesh support to prevent normal map skewing. In my case I can't modify the CAD data (to add support loops/geometry) and there shouldn't be any need for that either. Baking with a skewmesh is a relatively new technique which largely solves the normal map skewing issue. But implementing this is still a bit of a workflow nightmare when working with a large amount of objects. Since your cage system uses some *Magic* to allow for non matching topology, why not use this tech to automatically generate a tesselated cage/mesh and also do the object to tangent space conversion? Or is this already done? There seems to be much less skewing than any other baker I have tried.
-3D mouse support. Working with different 3D programs (in my case Inventor, 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Knald, and Unity) is a real pain because they all use different key / mouse combinations to navigate the viewport. Making them all behave the same way is not possible. When using a 3D mouse (such as the one from 3Dconnexion), it unifies the navigation once and for all. Most major 3D applications support it now. You can't really appreciate how fantastic such a device is until you try it.
-UI wise, I wouldn't add a separate button to "load the baker". It should be always available in the tabs.
-A minor issue, but if you remove the mesh files from their current location and press bake/pre-process, no notification of the missing files is given.
-The ability to zoom in further would be nice.
-I have a mesh which makes Knald freeze. I will email it.
-Does the baker benefit from a high poly which is densely tesselated in flat areas?
-Does Knald support explicit (custom) mesh normals?
Alright been baking quite a lot of stuff knald seems pretty awesome but one thing that really annoys me is that i can't push my cage out it's grayed out why is that?
I have a few feature requests / questions / bug reports. I know that some of these have already been mentioned, but I would like to re-iterate a few points.
-Lack of sub-mesh support. This is a complete show stopper for me. I work exclusively with CAD data and the model I am working on has thousands of sub-meshes which is the result of how the CAD data is structured. Baking maps for these objects individually is simply not an option. On top of that, many of the low poly meshes are fused (to save draw calls), but this means I have to fuse the same high poly objects as well. Added together, the whole thing requires an incredible amount of work, hence the show stopper.
-Match by name baking. Similar as in Substance Painter / Designer. The lack thereof is a showstopper as well because of the sheer amount of (sub) objects used in my model. Even if there was support for sub meshes, it would be pointless if it didn't came with match by name baking.
-Skewmesh support to prevent normal map skewing. In my case I can't modify the CAD data (to add support loops/geometry) and there shouldn't be any need for that either. Baking with a skewmesh is a relatively new technique which largely solves the normal map skewing issue. But implementing this is still a bit of a workflow nightmare when working with a large amount of objects. Since your cage system uses some *Magic* to allow for non matching topology, why not use this tech to automatically generate a tesselated cage/mesh and also do the object to tangent space conversion? Or is this already done? There seems to be much less skewing than any other baker I have tried.
-3D mouse support. Working with different 3D programs (in my case Inventor, 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Knald, and Unity) is a real pain because they all use different key / mouse combinations to navigate the viewport. Making them all behave the same way is not possible. When using a 3D mouse (such as the one from 3Dconnexion), it unifies the navigation once and for all. Most major 3D applications support it now. You can't really appreciate how fantastic such a device is until you try it.
-UI wise, I wouldn't add a separate button to "load the baker". It should be always available in the tabs.
-A minor issue, but if you remove the mesh files from their current location and press bake/pre-process, no notification of the missing files is given.
-The ability to zoom in further would be nice.
-I have a mesh which makes Knald freeze. I will email it.
-Does the baker benefit from a high poly which is densely tesselated in flat areas?
-Does Knald support explicit (custom) mesh normals?
1+2, Sub-mesh and name matching support is on the list of things to do for a future release. 3, We will look into an elegant way to improve skewing, though tessellation is pretty brute force and is quite wasteful when it comes to memory consumption in this context. We aim to keep Knald's footprint to a minimum in order to have it run efficiently but I'm sure we can come up with a nice solution to the problem. 4, We have never been asked to support 3d mice before, but it sounds like a cool idea. I will add it to the user wishlist. 5, We do this in order to keep Knald efficient and to ensure the integrator/Color to Normal and the baker are separated. 6, You should already get a popup (as of 1.1.2) to let you know when meshes are no longer present. Can you let me know the filepath you are using please? Are you pointing to a network or external drive? 7, Noted and added to the user wishlist. 8, Already spoken to you via email about this 9, It shouldn't matter if the area is 100% flat really. Can you give me a more specific example please? 10, Yes, Knald will use whatever mesh normals are contained within the imported LP mesh, including custom tangents via FBX when the option is selected in the preferences.
Alright been baking quite a lot of stuff knald seems pretty awesome but one thing that really annoys me is that i can't push my cage out it's grayed out why is that?
Thanks for the kind words
This is happening because you have loaded a cage mesh. We assume that if you load a cage mesh then you have already defined the projection distance (push) of the cage. Loading a cage mesh is not necessary in Knald and the both range and push can be viewed and modified independently. You can do this by clicking "view cage" and "view range". Set the "Search Range" to "Manual" if you don't want the range to track the push value.
1. Material ID map, ability to use the material color as the source. This is because one mesh can have multiple materials applied. Make sure it works well once sub-meshes are supported :-)
2. When a map is added and bake is pressed, don't bake all maps again. Only bake if there has been a change in the individual map settings.
3. A slider for AO intensity (in the shader) would be nice to see the effect on the model. I use it in Unity all the time, slide the AO intensity up and down to see if some areas have any AO at all. Of course you can look at the texture map, but that requires knowing where to look.
4. Re-calculate AO only upon slider release, not during sliding, because it is slow to respond.
5. Ability to show the mesh wireframe and if you click on a polygon it highlights. The polygon then highlights on the texture map as well. This way you can locate problem areas.
6. About not getting a warning when the mesh is removed, that seems to be an isolated case as it works now. I had the meshes in a folder on the desktop (not a network drive but local) and moved it to another physical drive, but also on the same PC.
7. About tessellation in flat areas, that is for the model I emailed you. But if it won't make a difference, that's fine. Even better :-)
Hey, just bought two extra licenses at work but I've had a rough time making it work on one of the computers, it works perfectly fine on one machine but crashes on the other oneas soon as I try to load anything when the 3d viewer pops up. Nothing fancy about the computer: windows 7, a gtx970 with latest drivers. If you could point me to a solution or clue to know where to look at I would be very grateful. Cheers
The 3d viewer keeps showing up on my right screen, disabling the second display does not bring the viewer back to monitor 1.
Hey, just bought two extra licenses at work but I've had a rough time making it work on one of the computers, it works perfectly fine on one machine but crashes on the other oneas soon as I try to load anything when the 3d viewer pops up. Nothing fancy about the computer: windows 7, a gtx970 with latest drivers. If you could point me to a solution or clue to know where to look at I would be very grateful. Cheers
The 3d viewer keeps showing up on my right screen, disabling the second display does not bring the viewer back to monitor 1.
Hey!
Do you get any kind of error message at all?
Can you try opening the 3d preview window and saving your settings before loading anything to see if that helps please? Also if you move the windows and then save your settings then Knald should remember the position of the window so it doesn't appear off screen.
If those methods don't work then you can delete your knald.ini from the C:/Users/%username%/AppData/Roaming/Knald Technologies folder which will force Knald to regenerate a fresh .ini file.
Hey Mettaliandy thanks for the tips! After hours of searching I found the problem and Knald was not at fault, some stupid network optimisation software bundled with the network drivers (killer network if I recall correctly) made knald and hipchat freeze when loading.(that's what made me think it was a network issue)
I am having some problems with a simple cube test bake. The normal map and ID map don't bake correctly.
This is the low poly:
This is the high poly. The material on top is a multi material in 3ds Max.
This is how the ID map bakes in Knald:
For reference, this is the ID map baked in Substance Painter.
This is the normal map baked in Knald:
For reference, this is the normal map baked in Substance Painter.
I have emailed you the fbx files. The cage file seems to be imported incorrectly, but if you use the Knald-generated cage, it still doesn't bake correctly.
1. Material ID map, ability to use the material color as the source. This is because one mesh can have multiple materials applied. Make sure it works well once sub-meshes are supported :-)
2. When a map is added and bake is pressed, don't bake all maps again. Only bake if there has been a change in the individual map settings.
3. A slider for AO intensity (in the shader) would be nice to see the effect on the model. I use it in Unity all the time, slide the AO intensity up and down to see if some areas have any AO at all. Of course you can look at the texture map, but that requires knowing where to look.
4. Re-calculate AO only upon slider release, not during sliding, because it is slow to respond.
5. Ability to show the mesh wireframe and if you click on a polygon it highlights. The polygon then highlights on the texture map as well. This way you can locate problem areas.
6. About not getting a warning when the mesh is removed, that seems to be an isolated case as it works now. I had the meshes in a folder on the desktop (not a network drive but local) and moved it to another physical drive, but also on the same PC.
7. About tessellation in flat areas, that is for the model I emailed you. But if it won't make a difference, that's fine. Even better :-)
Sorry I missed this post! 1. Yup! Material IDs are set for a future release 2. I will have to talk to the team about this, but I don't think you will see much of a speed up by only baking maps that have had their settings changed as the majority of maps are pretty instant. It might be worth seeing if this can be done for AO and Transmission however. Basically if you are baking one map then the time cost to rebake other maps is pretty negligible. 3+5 . Thanks for the suggestions! I've added it to the user wishlist. You an view the baked maps in the 3d preview window by changing the first dropdown menu that says 'Lighting' by default 4. Thanks for the suggestion. Which control are you referring to? For the most part you should only ever really need to change the Rays value and for now I would suggest typing in the value directly into the spinner 6. Ok, Let us know if it happens again 7. Alright
Would be cool if Knald could bake color and depth/normal texture from hi poly to low poly like xNormal . Can it?
The only colour baking that Knald currently supports is vertex colours from FBX or from OBJ (polypaint). We will increase support in a future release. Knald can already bake normal and height/displacement from a high poly to low poly mesh. Is that what you mean?
I am having some problems with a simple cube test bake. The normal map and ID map don't bake correctly.
This is the low poly:
This is the high poly. The material on top is a multi material in 3ds Max.
This is how the ID map bakes in Knald:
For reference, this is the ID map baked in Substance Painter.
This is the normal map baked in Knald:
For reference, this is the normal map baked in Substance Painter.
I have emailed you the fbx files. The cage file seems to be imported incorrectly, but if you use the Knald-generated cage, it still doesn't bake correctly.
Any idea what is causing these errors?
Knald only supports Material ID via Mesh ID currently, which is why it bakes as red (1 mesh = 1 colour).
It looks like the meshes are being imported into Knald at different sizes. The HP mesh is much larger than the LP mesh. Have you tried resetting your xform in max before exporting meshes?
Would be cool if Knald could bake color and depth/normal texture from hi poly to low poly like xNormal . Can it?
The only colour baking that Knald currently supports is vertex colours from FBX or from OBJ (polypaint). We will increase support in a future release. Knald can already bake normal and height/displacement from a high poly to low poly mesh. Is that what you mean?
No. I meant a case when my hi poly is too huge to export and load and I can use a kind of mid-poly instead + normal map (or better displacement/bump map) for super tiny details. I did so all the time with xNormal or 3d max before.
Ability to bake /reproject color texture from that mid-poly to low poly is a necessary thing in that workflow too.
Often saving and loading super huge mesh takes more time than baking itself and if you are lucky enough and your hi poly just not hangs the baker.
No. I meant a case when my hi poly is too huge to export and load and I can use a kind of mid-poly instead + normal map (or better displacement/bump map) for super tiny details. I did so all the time with xNormal or 3d max before.
Ability to bake /reproject color texture from that mid-poly to low poly is a necessary thing in that workflow too.
Often saving and loading super huge mesh takes more time than baking itself and if you are lucky enough and your hi poly just not hangs the baker.
Hey!
I'm still not 100% sure I know exactly what you mean. Do you mean loading a medium poly with a tiling detail map in place of the high poly?
Could you show me an example of the workflow please?
Yes, only not the tiling detail map, Just a regular one with unique UV ( auto packed UV tiles from Zbrush ). An example would be a bit heavy since my "mid-poly" is still hundreds mb to upload. Just consider my "hi-poly" beyond what the soft could load and the only option is to put the rest into "detail" bump map.
Hey Andy, Im very happy to hear some of my top wishlist features are going to be added into Knald! I was wondering if theres any ETA on the submesh support for fbx and ID maps from material colors. Keep up the good work! Knald has improved a lot since v1, can't wait to use it for my final bakes once the few missing features have been added
The control is for the AO rays value indeed. If you set the texture to 4k, it takes some time to complete. Mind you, still much much faster than the competition, but still too slow for "realtime" slider updating.
If I already baked an AO map and decide I want to bake a normal map (for instance) as well, it re-bakes the entire AO map again. This takes quite a bit of time if it is a large texture. So I am sure there is some workflow gain to be made here.
The cubes are the same size in 3ds Max. Maybe it is an FBX export problem. Strange that Substance Painter bakes it correctly though, so you might want to have a look at the file I send you nevertheless.
By the way, if you can solve the skewing issue with some clever magic, you will be the first one to do so as no one has cracked this nut before. This will give you an edge over any other baker as dealing with skewing requires a lot of manual work, thus time, and time is money. I sure hope you can put this high on the priority list, together with submeshes, name matching, and material color IDs. I *really* need those before Knald is of any use to me. Otherwise it requires just too much manual work to prepare my models for baking.
What would also be nice once sub meshes are supported, is a flexible method to control which sub meshes receive their own textures. Personally I would like to see it work the same way as in Substance Painter. There you give each low poly part which you want to have its own texture, a separate material. Others might want this to be perhaps controlled by the material ID, or simply a separate texture for each sub mesh. Having a dropdown list so you can choose your preferred method of texture creation would be helpful.
Hello. Have downloaded recently Knald demo and it worked fine - 3d View, Maps import etc, but had one problem. When I try to load mesh for bake or at the 3d view the programm crashes. I have installed latest Nvidia drivers, reinstalled Knald, tried around 10 different meshes as fbx and obj format nothing worked. Upd: Maps Exprot doesn't work too - change Export Path - press Export - and folder is empty
Yes, only not the tiling detail map, Just a regular one with unique UV ( auto packed UV tiles from Zbrush ). An example would be a bit heavy since my "mid-poly" is still hundreds mb to upload. Just consider my "hi-poly" beyond what the soft could load and the only option is to put the rest into "detail" bump map.
Ok, cool. Thanks for the clarification! I will see what I can do
Hey Andy, Im very happy to hear some of my top wishlist features are going to be added into Knald! I was wondering if theres any ETA on the submesh support for fbx and ID maps from material colors. Keep up the good work! Knald has improved a lot since v1, can't wait to use it for my final bakes once the few missing features have been added
Awesome ! Thanks for the kind words We cant give any definitive ETA on submesh or material id colour support unfortunately. We will add them as soon as we can though!
The control is for the AO rays value indeed. If you set the texture to 4k, it takes some time to complete. Mind you, still much much faster than the competition, but still too slow for "realtime" slider updating.
If I already baked an AO map and decide I want to bake a normal map (for instance) as well, it re-bakes the entire AO map again. This takes quite a bit of time if it is a large texture. So I am sure there is some workflow gain to be made here.
The cubes are the same size in 3ds Max. Maybe it is an FBX export problem. Strange that Substance Painter bakes it correctly though, so you might want to have a look at the file I send you nevertheless.
By the way, if you can solve the skewing issue with some clever magic, you will be the first one to do so as no one has cracked this nut before. This will give you an edge over any other baker as dealing with skewing requires a lot of manual work, thus time, and time is money. I sure hope you can put this high on the priority list, together with submeshes, name matching, and material color IDs. I *really* need those before Knald is of any use to me. Otherwise it requires just too much manual work to prepare my models for baking.
Ok, cool. Thanks for the information regarding the use case with AO/Transmission and your other requests. We will investigate the FBX issue too
What would also be nice once sub meshes are supported, is a flexible method to control which sub meshes receive their own textures. Personally I would like to see it work the same way as in Substance Painter. There you give each low poly part which you want to have its own texture, a separate material. Others might want this to be perhaps controlled by the material ID, or simply a separate texture for each sub mesh. Having a dropdown list so you can choose your preferred method of texture creation would be helpful.
Thanks for the suggestions! Added to user wish list!
Hello. Have downloaded recently Knald demo and it worked fine - 3d View, Maps import etc, but had one problem. When I try to load mesh for bake or at the 3d view the programm crashes. I have installed latest Nvidia drivers, reinstalled Knald, tried around 10 different meshes as fbx and obj format nothing worked. Upd: Maps Exprot doesn't work too - change Export Path - press Export - and folder is empty
This issue is likely something specific to your
system that is causing the crash and as such is hard to debug on our
end, so it would be helpful if you could tell us about anything that you
may have installed such as shell extensions/enhancements on your system
or any recent changes to Windows etc.
It would be great if you could do the following:
Type winver into the search bar/start menu, run the winver.exe and tell me the build version of Windows.
Run DXDiag, export the report and send us the resulting .txt file
Last but not least, could you zip up and send me the contents from the following folder please? C:/Users/%username%/AppData/Local/Knald Technologies
It contains logs and crash information that might help us figure out what the problem is. You can send everything to support@knaldtech.com
I wonder if Knald uses GPU for AO only? Just tried to bake height and normal maps from 78 mil polis hi-res model and see only cpu loading and zero gpu
We use the CPU and GPU extensively during processing within Knald but also try to be efficient with the resources we have available to us. In this case HP to LP matching is done on the CPU primarily because it keeps the memory footprint down on the GPU to be used for other features and because it's reasonably fast to do so.
One other thing. Having a slider in one window which controls something in another window (cage push) is counter intuitive and goes against good UI design in my opinion. I see why you want to do that as it enables the program to run without the additional window and thus be more lean, but you might want to find another way to solve this. And is there really a need to have the 3D view in a separate window? The majority of the people baking have a above average hardware so you probably won't notice any difference in load times and memory usages anyway.
Quick Question, are you guys ever planning on implementing a Meshname ID Feature like Subtance, I would really love that feature for Knald, especially with how awesome it is already, that for me would be the cherry on top.
One other thing. Having a slider in one window which controls something in another window (cage push) is counter intuitive and goes against good UI design in my opinion. I see why you want to do that as it enables the program to run without the additional window and thus be more lean, but you might want to find another way to solve this. And is there really a need to have the 3D view in a separate window? The majority of the people baking have a above average hardware so you probably won't notice any difference in load times and memory usages anyway.
Thanks for the comments! I'm not sure if you know this or not but the 3d preview window is actually dockable to the left and right of the main window. Having the 3d preview as a separate window allow people the flexibility to place it where it suits them best.
To dock the window simply drag the 3d preview to the far left and right edges of the main interface and you will get a light blue highlight. Once this happens release the LMB to dock.
Quick Question, are you guys ever planning on implementing a Meshname ID Feature like Subtance, I would really love that feature for Knald, especially with how awesome it is already, that for me would be the cherry on top.
Thanks for the kind words! Always great to see a happy face Sub-mesh and name matching support is on the list of things to do for a future release. Stay tuned!
Hmm, found a bug. Normal map with alpha channel (TGA) caused my texture to be flipped vertically on import into knald!
this bug is still apparent!
Hi! Sorry for the late reply. Can you send us a texture that causes the issue please? I can't reproduce it any more here. Send the texture to support@knaldtech.com or PM me a link.
Here is an idea. You know how you adjust the cage so that it does not intersect with nearby geometry in confined spaces? Surely this can be automated. Some algorithm can detect that the cage is being pushed too far and limits the range locally. This way the optimum cage push distance can be set at the push of a button. And what if one setting is just far enough to encompass geometry sticking out, but too far to encompass cutout geometry? In that case you need a custom cage, which is no fun to make.
Another use case is where you fused multiple sub meshes together in order to save draw calls. If these meshes are closely spaced together, it can generate baking errors because it will essentially create multiple cages because the vertices are not part of a single watertight shape.
What we need is a smart cage system where it walks along the surface and "knows" what's going on. No baker ever made this work so I wonder if such a thing is impossible? Any interest in tackling this?
Awesome stuff you guys doing with Knald! Big thx My question regarding about normal baking. How I need to setup knald for baking without cage? like in maya "match using: surface normals".
Here is an idea. You know how you adjust the cage so that it does not intersect with nearby geometry in confined spaces? Surely this can be automated. Some algorithm can detect that the cage is being pushed too far and limits the range locally. This way the optimum cage push distance can be set at the push of a button.
Do you think this is feasible?
Thanks for the suggestion! Added to the user wish list
Awesome stuff you guys doing with Knald! Big thx My question regarding about normal baking. How I need to setup knald for baking without cage? like in maya "match using: surface normals".
Thanks for the kind words! Knald always uses a cage internally even if you dont load one, although there are a couple of different options you can set to control how the projection is handled (which require a rebake to take effect if selected post bake).
Ray Distribution:: The method used for controlling ray distribution.
Aligned: Forces the cage vertices to align with the soft normal direction of the Low Poly vertices.
Unadjusted: Forces the ray direction to be controlled by the unmodified cage vertices.
Hi, awesome software. Is it possible to bake to multiple textures when the mesh is spread across a couple?
Thanks! Currently it's only possible to bake one set of textures at a time, so if you have say, a head and body mesh each with separate UVs/textures, you can only bake one or the other rather than both at the same time.
Hi, one simple feature req of the texture converter: I like to export the loaded colortexture aswell (or with an option to mix with the AO) Thanks for this gem of software so far. Also /sign for BitBarrel cage idea (Lost amount of time to adjust the cages)
After playing a bit with the demo, I decided to buy the full version. In its current state it is not usable for me due to the lack of sub-mesh support, but I think Knald is very promising and already is already miles ahead of the competition. I want to support the development and hopefully the feature requests on this forum will be implemented soon.
Hi, one simple feature req of the texture converter: I like
to export the loaded colortexture aswell (or with an option to mix with
the AO) Thanks for this gem of software so far. Also /sign for BitBarrel cage idea (Lost amount of time to adjust the cages)
Can you explain a little more as to what you are looking for in this
regard please? You just want the AO to be multiplied over the colour?
After playing a bit with the demo, I decided to
buy the full version. In its current state it is not usable for me due
to the lack of sub-mesh support, but I think Knald is very promising and
already is already miles ahead of the competition. I want to support
the development and hopefully the feature requests on this forum will be
implemented soon.
Thanks for the support! We will get to sub-mesh support as soon as
we can as it is a priority for us. We have lots of requests to add and
are getting though them as fast as we can
Replies
However I'm only using it for test baking atm as its missing some features that I kind of need when baking whole meshes.
-Baking IDS from exported materials, this is really useful when baking IDS
-Match meshes by mesh name, this one is a time saver as you don't have to explode your mesh, just rename parts correctly so they match and they are good to
-When I export a bunch of meshes on an fbx file it only loads one mesh, this is pretty annoying.
I am really looking forward to see those features in the software, Im really impressed by how fast and how good the quality of the bakes is. Love the ambient oclussion.
It would be nice to have an settings option to auto load the baker and the 3d viewport when Knald opens.
Since the 1.1.1 release of Knald last month we have been hard at work improving mesh processing and baking speeds in addition to fixing a few bugs and adding some other new improvements to Knald. Enjoy!
What’s changed since Knald 1.1.1?
New Features, Improvements and Optimizations
Bug fixes
You can grab the new from your account
You can find build notes here: https://www.knaldtech.com/knald-update-build20160409001/
We really want to thank everyone for all the hard work and feedback during Knald's development. Please do continue sending us suggestions & posting everything you can!
Thanks,
Chris Gilbert
Knald Technologies
PS: I replied to a bunch of your questions in a prior post but seems like it's held up waiting for moderator approval - hopefully it goes through soon!
Some of these questions I will punt to Andy (who is out of office for a few days), but I will do my best to answer the rest of them for you now.
Regarding baking IDS - Andy will have to chime in on this, sorry!
Mesh matching is on our TODO list - hopefully we will have some more specifics regarding this soon.
We currently only support one mesh per FBX, but this is something we have considered adding support for, I will discuss it further with the team.
Thanks for the suggestion! We will look into this.
Currently there is not - due to how optimized our baker is this is more complex than usual.
It's something we'd like to fix in the future but currently do not have an ETA for.
Andy will have to speak to this when he returns - sorry!
Thanks,
Chris Gilbert
Knald Technologies
I can't make any promises right now - but I'll discuss it with the team and look into making this change in our next release.
Thanks!
Chris Gilbert
Knald Technologies
I am still confuse about the license terms, the freelancer license mention non commercial use so i wonder if a single indie developer like me can use the freelancer license for commercial work yes or no?
Thank for any quick reply
The Freelancer license absolutely allows for commercial use (regardless of revenue).
The EULA is a little more complex in terms of legal wording but essentially the only stipulation for the Freelancer license is that to be eligible for it you have to be an individual, or a single person company and that person has to be the licensee. Other than that you can use it for whatever you want pretty much.
It's already on the list of things to add for a future update.
-Lack of sub-mesh support. This is a complete show stopper for me. I work exclusively with CAD data and the model I am working on has thousands of sub-meshes which is the result of how the CAD data is structured. Baking maps for these objects individually is simply not an option. On top of that, many of the low poly meshes are fused (to save draw calls), but this means I have to fuse the same high poly objects as well. Added together, the whole thing requires an incredible amount of work, hence the show stopper.
-Match by name baking. Similar as in Substance Painter / Designer. The lack thereof is a showstopper as well because of the sheer amount of (sub) objects used in my model. Even if there was support for sub meshes, it would be pointless if it didn't came with match by name baking.
-Skewmesh support to prevent normal map skewing. In my case I can't modify the CAD data (to add support loops/geometry) and there shouldn't be any need for that either. Baking with a skewmesh is a relatively new technique which largely solves the normal map skewing issue. But implementing this is still a bit of a workflow nightmare when working with a large amount of objects. Since your cage system uses some *Magic* to allow for non matching topology, why not use this tech to automatically generate a tesselated cage/mesh and also do the object to tangent space conversion? Or is this already done? There seems to be much less skewing than any other baker I have tried.
-3D mouse support. Working with different 3D programs (in my case Inventor, 3ds Max, Substance Painter, Knald, and Unity) is a real pain because they all use different key / mouse combinations to navigate the viewport. Making them all behave the same way is not possible. When using a 3D mouse (such as the one from 3Dconnexion), it unifies the navigation once and for all. Most major 3D applications support it now. You can't really appreciate how fantastic such a device is until you try it.
-UI wise, I wouldn't add a separate button to "load the baker". It should be always available in the tabs.
-A minor issue, but if you remove the mesh files from their current location and press bake/pre-process, no notification of the missing files is given.
-The ability to zoom in further would be nice.
-I have a mesh which makes Knald freeze. I will email it.
-Does the baker benefit from a high poly which is densely tesselated in flat areas?
-Does Knald support explicit (custom) mesh normals?
Knald can currently bake vertex colours from FBX or from OBJ (polypaint).
We we look into the ability to bake from a texture for a future release
1+2, Sub-mesh and name matching support is on the list of things to do for a future release.
3, We will look into an elegant way to improve skewing, though tessellation is pretty brute force and is quite wasteful when it comes to memory consumption in this context. We aim to keep Knald's footprint to a minimum in order to have it run efficiently but I'm sure we can come up with a nice solution to the problem.
4, We have never been asked to support 3d mice before, but it sounds like a cool idea. I will add it to the user wishlist.
5, We do this in order to keep Knald efficient and to ensure the integrator/Color to Normal and the baker are separated.
6, You should already get a popup (as of 1.1.2) to let you know when meshes are no longer present. Can you let me know the filepath you are using please? Are you pointing to a network or external drive?
7, Noted and added to the user wishlist.
8, Already spoken to you via email about this
9, It shouldn't matter if the area is 100% flat really. Can you give me a more specific example please?
10, Yes, Knald will use whatever mesh normals are contained within the imported LP mesh, including custom tangents via FBX when the option is selected in the preferences.
We are currently working on a full set of tutorials for Knald but you can learn about the non-baker side of the initial release of Knald here:
There is also a quick overview of the baker in Knald's documentation: http://docs.knaldtech.com/doku.php?id=baking_introduction_knald_1.1
Knald is pretty well documented so you should be able to learn about what everything does there too: http://docs.knaldtech.com/doku.php?id=knald_release_1_1
Thanks for the kind words
This is happening because you have loaded a cage mesh. We assume that if you load a cage mesh then you have already defined the projection distance (push) of the cage.
Loading a cage mesh is not necessary in Knald and the both range and push can be viewed and modified independently. You can do this by clicking "view cage" and "view range". Set the "Search Range" to "Manual" if you don't want the range to track the push value.
1. Material ID map, ability to use the material color as the source. This is because one mesh can have multiple materials applied. Make sure it works well once sub-meshes are supported :-)
5. Ability to show the mesh wireframe and if you click on a polygon it highlights. The polygon then highlights on the texture map as well. This way you can locate problem areas.
Cheers
The 3d viewer keeps showing up on my right screen, disabling the second display does not bring the viewer back to monitor 1.
Hey gnoop!
The current limit is around 75-80 million triangles but this will increase in the future.
Hope that helps!
Hey!
Do you get any kind of error message at all?
Can you try opening the 3d preview window and saving your settings before loading anything to see if that helps please?
Also if you move the windows and then save your settings then Knald should remember the position of the window so it doesn't appear off screen.
If those methods don't work then you can delete your knald.ini from the C:/Users/%username%/AppData/Roaming/Knald Technologies folder which will force Knald to regenerate a fresh .ini file.
Please let me know how you get on.
After hours of searching I found the problem and Knald was not at fault, some stupid network optimisation software bundled with the network drivers (killer network if I recall correctly) made knald and hipchat freeze when loading.(that's what made me think it was a network issue)
Issue solved :awesome:
This is the low poly:
This is the high poly. The material on top is a multi material in 3ds Max.
This is how the ID map bakes in Knald:
For reference, this is the ID map baked in Substance Painter.
This is the normal map baked in Knald:
For reference, this is the normal map baked in Substance Painter.
I have emailed you the fbx files. The cage file seems to be imported incorrectly, but if you use the Knald-generated cage, it still doesn't bake correctly.
Any idea what is causing these errors?
1. Yup! Material IDs are set for a future release
2. I will have to talk to the team about this, but I don't think you will see much of a speed up by only baking maps that have had their settings changed as the majority of maps are pretty instant. It might be worth seeing if this can be done for AO and Transmission however. Basically if you are baking one map then the time cost to rebake other maps is pretty negligible.
3+5 . Thanks for the suggestions! I've added it to the user wishlist. You an view the baked maps in the 3d preview window by changing the first dropdown menu that says 'Lighting' by default
4. Thanks for the suggestion. Which control are you referring to? For the most part you should only ever really need to change the Rays value and for now I would suggest typing in the value directly into the spinner
6. Ok, Let us know if it happens again
7. Alright
The only colour baking that Knald currently supports is vertex colours from FBX or from OBJ (polypaint). We will increase support in a future release.
Knald can already bake normal and height/displacement from a high poly to low poly mesh. Is that what you mean?
Material IDs are set for a future release
Knald only supports Material ID via Mesh ID currently, which is why it bakes as red (1 mesh = 1 colour).
It looks like the meshes are being imported into Knald at different sizes. The HP mesh is much larger than the LP mesh.
Have you tried resetting your xform in max before exporting meshes?
Let me know how you get on
Hey! I'm still not 100% sure I know exactly what you mean. Do you mean loading a medium poly with a tiling detail map in place of the high poly? Could you show me an example of the workflow please?
If I already baked an AO map and decide I want to bake a normal map (for instance) as well, it re-bakes the entire AO map again. This takes quite a bit of time if it is a large texture. So I am sure there is some workflow gain to be made here.
The cubes are the same size in 3ds Max. Maybe it is an FBX export problem. Strange that Substance Painter bakes it correctly though, so you might want to have a look at the file I send you nevertheless.
By the way, if you can solve the skewing issue with some clever magic, you will be the first one to do so as no one has cracked this nut before. This will give you an edge over any other baker as dealing with skewing requires a lot of manual work, thus time, and time is money. I sure hope you can put this high on the priority list, together with submeshes, name matching, and material color IDs. I *really* need those before Knald is of any use to me. Otherwise it requires just too much manual work to prepare my models for baking.
Upd: Maps Exprot doesn't work too - change Export Path - press Export - and folder is empty
Ok, cool. Thanks for the clarification! I will see what I can do
Awesome ! Thanks for the kind words
We cant give any definitive ETA on submesh or material id colour support unfortunately. We will add them as soon as we can though!
Ok, cool. Thanks for the information regarding the use case with AO/Transmission and your other requests.
We will investigate the FBX issue too
Thanks for the suggestions! Added to user wish list!
This issue is likely something specific to your system that is causing the crash and as such is hard to debug on our end, so it would be helpful if you could tell us about anything that you may have installed such as shell extensions/enhancements on your system or any recent changes to Windows etc.
It would be great if you could do the following:
https://www.knaldtech.com/docs/doku.php?id=clean_driver_installation
Last but not least, could you zip up and send me the contents from the following folder please? C:/Users/%username%/AppData/Local/Knald Technologies
It contains logs and crash information that might help us figure out what the problem is.
You can send everything to support@knaldtech.com
Thanks!
We use the CPU and GPU extensively during processing within Knald but also try to be efficient with the resources we have available to us. In this case HP to LP matching is done on the CPU primarily because it keeps the memory footprint down on the GPU to be used for other features and because it's reasonably fast to do so.I'm not sure if you know this or not but the 3d preview window is actually dockable to the left and right of the main window. Having the 3d preview as a separate window allow people the flexibility to place it where it suits them best.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/2057427/Polycount/knald_docking.mp4
To dock the window simply drag the 3d preview to the far left and right edges of the main interface and you will get a light blue highlight. Once this happens release the LMB to dock.
Thanks for the kind words! Always great to see a happy face
Sub-mesh and name matching support is on the list of things to do for a future release. Stay tuned!
Can you send us a texture that causes the issue please? I can't reproduce it any more here.
Send the texture to support@knaldtech.com or PM me a link.
Thanks!
Another use case is where you fused multiple sub meshes together in order to save draw calls. If these meshes are closely spaced together, it can generate baking errors because it will essentially create multiple cages because the vertices are not part of a single watertight shape.
What we need is a smart cage system where it walks along the surface and "knows" what's going on. No baker ever made this work so I wonder if such a thing is impossible? Any interest in tackling this?
My question regarding about normal baking. How I need to setup knald for baking without cage? like in maya "match using: surface normals".
Thanks for the kind words!
Knald always uses a cage internally even if you dont load one, although there are a couple of different options you can set to control how the projection is handled (which require a rebake to take effect if selected post bake).
Ray Distribution:: The method used for controlling ray distribution.
https://docs.knaldtech.com/doku.php?id=the_baker_knald_1.1#ray_projection_settingsHope that helps!
Currently it's only possible to bake one set of textures at a time, so if you have say, a head and body mesh each with separate UVs/textures, you can only bake one or the other rather than both at the same time.
Hope that makes sense
one simple feature req of the texture converter: I like to export the loaded colortexture aswell (or with an option to mix with the AO)
Thanks for this gem of software so far. Also /sign for BitBarrel cage idea (Lost amount of time to adjust the cages)
Can you explain a little more as to what you are looking for in this regard please? You just want the AO to be multiplied over the colour?
I will talk to the team about this and see what they think
Thanks for the support! We will get to sub-mesh support as soon as we can as it is a priority for us. We have lots of requests to add and are getting though them as fast as we can