Most efficient way to bake maps

Raptor_Arts

Hello guys and girls!

I'd just like to ask what you all find is the best way to bake maps? I'm trying to make a stone floor texture and I'm trying to bake the maps within Maya. However it sure is taking its time and when I check my Task Manager it says that Maya isn't responding and it's using a hell of a lot of memory. Would I have better luck using another method/software?

I've attached an image of what it is I'm trying to bake and as you can see the polycount etc is there just so you have an idea.

I've got 16GB of RAM but would it be worth upgrading to 32GB if I'm doing a lot of high poly modelling and baking? I'm not the most knowledgeable of people when it comes to computer tech so how can I better improve my rig to handle such tasks better?

Thanks for any and all help :thumbup:

passerby

If you use Maya I would make sure to enable viewport 2.0 for anything highpoly, and delete all history first.
But personally I wouldn't bother with Maya for the bake. But use xNormal instead.

I find xNormal just easier to work with and find it performs better.

Raptor_Arts

Yeah I do use xNormal as well, but thanks for the tip there. I shall try using viewport 2.0 and see if it speeds things up

passerby

Raptor_Arts wrote: »

Yeah I do use xNormal as well, but thanks for the tip there. I shall try using viewport 2.0 and see if it speeds things up

viewport 2.0 wont speed the actually bake up, just helps with viewport lag and stuff if your working with millions of polys in viewport.


As far as baking, just make sure you deleted history on all objects in the bake, the more history a object has the slower the bake.

mikool

you can also try decimating your high poly mesh a little, there is most likely many polygons that could be cut without any impact on the look of the mesh. That could provide huge Memory savings and make your bakes faster.

But baking with xnormal using cuda cores is probably the fastest.

You could also try using Turtle baker in maya, its a little different to set up than maya's built in transfer maps but i find it to be more stable and flexible. Not sure if it would be faster though.

SuperFranky

Decimate your mesh before bringing it to maya. You can easily decimate in zbrush to 20% without losing any details.

Raptor_Arts

That definitely sounds like it should speed up baking, I shall look into it. Is it possible to do it in Mudbox? Thanks

SuperFranky

Raptor_Arts wrote: »

That definitely sounds like it should speed up baking, I shall look into it. Is it possible to do it in Mudbox? Thanks

I don't think that Mudbox has it, but there are various third party\open source solutions.

Thaurdol

In the Mesh panel of Mudbox you have Reduce in which you can set how much % you wish to reduce the polycount of your mesh. Though I do have to note that your mesh will be triangulated due to this process.

Zarakun

+1 for the Turtle plug-in if you absolutely want to stick to Maya (best way for me to get a good AO inside Maya or if you want to bake special shader settings like a color ramp). But if you don't have any problem with xNormal you should use it.

For third party programs to decimate efficiently your mesh you can use MeshLab, it's free and fast and easy to use once you get the proper tutorials (you may encounter some crash sometimes).