Designer: Basics, baking
polycounter lvl 18
I'm working through a project and integrating Designer for the first time. I mainly do hard surface models with several moving parts, which I bake with xNormal via Chris Whitaker's Funky Xnormal Batcher. That lets me bake several LP / HP pieces and then combine those maps in PS with one button press (Generate PSD button at the bottom). Then I can take the transparency from the groups and do edge dilation. This lets me build using a combinations of Max and ZB with things assembled and not have to do an explode bake (so it's a hide show bake that is pretty painless).
I could mimic the baking process in Designer fairly well (nice setup feature on this now), but I don't grasp how to combine the maps. The edge dilation on each of the low polys goes out very wide and then masking them and bringing them together isn't intuitive (should I be taking the mask from a UV to SVG, then blending them together?). After I hacked something to mask it out there doesn't seem to be a native edge dilation feature (I found a node on the Allegorithmic forum, but I didn't get the results I expected).
Kicking the results out to PS to combine them works, but I am definitely missing something in the 'bake several pieces and composite them' workflow
. The amount of video tutorials is overwhelming (which is awesome), but I've not run into anything that covers this. Can anyone direct me to something?
Another question: Is there any way to render rectangular UVs? It's slightly better to render at native res and I often work at 1kx2k
I could mimic the baking process in Designer fairly well (nice setup feature on this now), but I don't grasp how to combine the maps. The edge dilation on each of the low polys goes out very wide and then masking them and bringing them together isn't intuitive (should I be taking the mask from a UV to SVG, then blending them together?). After I hacked something to mask it out there doesn't seem to be a native edge dilation feature (I found a node on the Allegorithmic forum, but I didn't get the results I expected).
Kicking the results out to PS to combine them works, but I am definitely missing something in the 'bake several pieces and composite them' workflow
. The amount of video tutorials is overwhelming (which is awesome), but I've not run into anything that covers this. Can anyone direct me to something?Another question: Is there any way to render rectangular UVs? It's slightly better to render at native res and I often work at 1kx2k
Replies