The export script is doing a bunch of work to align the normals to maya's renderer. When you export FBX the normals are subtly changed when triangulated. Originally, this was acceptable when we were working with lower poly files base meshes. If you don't care about them being in FBX and you just care about the results, I can see about implementing a custom file format. This would make the export much faster.
Note - For the low poly base mesh, You ONLY need to sue the low script when baking tangent normal maps. You an use the high script for every other type of map.
I see .. thanks for the info that really helps. I think I'll try a two pass approach - exporting the smoothed high for displacement manually and then the FBX low via the script.
This is a really great tool, it's beautifully designed and is saving me tons of time.
+1 for me on this as well, I always do that and then lose my already baked file. bencowellthomas said:
Oh and a small request .. could you make it an option that when you add a new preset it clears out the output file path ? .. I'm forever accidentally overwriting my last bake output with my new one as I forget to change this value.
Would it be possible in a future release to add the ability to do DownSlope and UpSlope Occlusion?
At the moment we only have hemissphere AO. Downslope AO only shoots rays from the lower half of the 'env sphere' (upslope only from the upper) giving you directional occlusion that goes only down or only up.
Really useful for things like building weathering (just one sample)
When you say upper and lower are you referring to the upper and lower half of the sphere or hemisphere? If you are talking about the lower half of the sphere, can you try the 'thickness' map bake and see if that gives you what you want? It may be inverted from what you are looking for, but that's easy enough to add.
Hm, I will give it a try next week but it doesn't quite sound right. For reference this is what I am looking for. This is generated using Modo's 'Downslope' and 'Upslope' Occlusion settings. (in this case just 3 different AO Processes (hemisphere, down, up) packed into a single RGB)
one thing isn't working for me at all - curvature bakes across UDIM tiles. Here's a visual of the differentiation its throwing back across the seams....
this does such a fast awesome job with all my bakes, certainly faster then Mari 3 or VRay (the only other UDIM supported baking engines I've used) but this bug makes curvature maps useless. I haven't seen it in the other maps yet.
first of all i wanted to second campis request. would be really nice to have. maybe with adjustable settings for each of the rgb channels!?
unfortunately i also seem to run into the same problem as etherealartiste but even worse i can not double check in the moment since my license doesn´t get recognized today (for the second time during the last 3 days). wonder how the system works? i remember i´m not the first one where it happens. that has to become more reliable!!
last but not least (cant double check as well but leave it here) i remember that one of my first bakes (highpoly only) i was able to bake a normal map as well with a quad mesh to get the object space normals. some days later it asked me to triangulate my mesh. only difference which might occured that i used the release in the beginning but switched toi the beta version in between!
Hey there, Really enjoying Mighty Bake so far, just wondering how the "Matched baking" works as far as name convention. ie how do I have to name my files so it will bake parts separately?
MightyBake, I'm having a bug on the latest beta. If I edit uv's on the mesh in any way, then use the high export button the uv's step back in the undo history after the file is exported. I've been doing a lot of low to low baking lately and noticed this.
Hey i dunno how i didn't see this before hand. but how does one load multiple meshes into mightybake at once? neither shift + click in the explorer works, nor dragging a selection into the highpoly field
I tried setting my scene up just like i would with substance designer and it just works meshname_low meshname_cage meshname_high_specification (many more highpolies baked into one lowpoly)
it works flawlessly, here i have no idea how it really works and there is no documentation.
so yeah after ages of a break, i tried it again and the experience has been anything but smooth. right now i guess your hottest competitor is substance designer - maybe knald or handplane i can't say, i will test handplane next if the name matching works there. But as it is right now i already see me baking - again - in maya as there is no easy way to bake many assets at once without exploding and if i have to do that again, i might as well just stick to maya
Just announcing version 1.5.0 is finally out of beta. You can download it here.
Version 1.5.0 – July 2 2016
(Feature) Rounded normal bake direction (Use to automatically smooth transfer or normal maps for low poly only bakes) Alpha version, feature still in progress
(Feature) .PLY support for high resolution mesh
(Feature) UDIM settings in each bake
(Feature) Added ‘Alpha Mask’ bake type – anti-aliased mask for showing the transferred areas
(Feature) Added ‘Hard Edge’ bake type – low poly edge highlighting for hard edges
Nice update. Does this software has available api for baking from external softwares? It would be great, if ID mask could be calculated from object materials (so instead of splitting id per mesh, we could split ID per material/face).
JoseConseco, doesn't it already do that? I set up a material in Maya and assign it to selected faces, when I bake id maps I get a separate colour or a separate image for each material I've assigned.
mightybake, just tried the new version, rounded corners baking is much improved! Looks like you've solved the weird lazer shading look on the edges, but it appears there is a bug with the corners where they get cut off in the bake, image below, and as stated above no intersecting rounding yet. Awesome release.
Nice round corners. malcolm - yep material seems to bake as ID map, and that is awesome! So my last question is: Is there some api, or command line access to MightyBake, that would allow me to bake from external 3d app? I would allow me to execute MightyBake directly from external 3D software.
I can't count the amount of times I've managed to write over the last bake I made when I load in a new object. I'm not quite sure how best to implement it but I think if we load in a new high or low mesh then the output path should clear (perhaps this could be an option). I find I accidentally overwrite at least 3 or 4 times a day .. maybe it's just me but it is frustrating.
Also I think the preset system needs a way for us to update or overwrite presets if we make a tweak to them. My preset menu is filled with countless numbered versions of presets as I'm not able to update them.
mightybake, just tried the new version, rounded corners baking is much improved! Looks like you've solved the weird lazer shading look on the edges, but it appears there is a bug with the corners where they get cut off in the bake, image below, and as stated above no intersecting rounding yet. Awesome release.
Loving MightyBake so far, but ideally I'd like to bypass Zbrush MME for creating my displacement maps.
@bencowellthomas Did you ever find a proper workflow for getting correct displacements out of MightyBake for offline rendering? I've been messing around with MightyBake but haven't found a good solution just yet.
Hi @Senor_Chewy ... I didn't find a perfect answer no. I guess logically there really is no way, as a displacement bake is all about measuring the offset between the high and the low mesh, so steps are inevitable.
My work around for now was to smooth the low mesh before baking the displacement. I don't use the shelf tools to export this model as it's too slow. I then export another low mesh using the shelf for the normal maps.
If the smoothing could perhaps be a step within mighty bake that would be great. But then it's depending on the smooth methods (ideally open subdiv) being EXACTLY the same as those in Maya or whichever software you use.
Hello, I just discovered MightyBake and i've to admit is CRAZY fast compared to everything else I used. I'm honestly laughing at the monitor while the buckets are rendered! I'm still struggling with some parts of the workflow and I've few questions:
1) When I export high, using the mightybake shelf in maya, timewise is as quick as it can be. When I export low for baking AO, for example, the time spent in exporting the geo is extremely high, so much I though maya was crashed several times before I let it go for enough time. I'm talking about 15/20 mins. for a 100k poly geo split in 4 or 5 objects. Does anyone have the same problem?
2) It seems that the maps are calculated by object. So geoA and geoB will not occlude each other unless they're combined together. The same principle apply to the other types of maps. This means that I have to merge everything together before I export for mightybake, otherwise I won't obtain the desired results. Merging all the geo together is kinda ok, but I end up with the problem above (waiting ages to have the mesh exported). Is it me doing something wrong?
3) This is more of a feature request. I've been experimenting with "Manual" in the UV tiling. The UDIM naming works great, but it's hard to guess U min, U max etc. It would be great if I could choose the UDIM writing a list, something like "1001-1012, 1026, 1038-1050".
Ganjica 1. There was a bug for a while causing the low to be really slow, but if you just installed it that issue should be fixed. Although my low polies are much lower than yours so maybe I've just never tried it on anything that high poly for the low. Also make sure to close the uv editor before exporting low, this will speed things up dramatically.
2. That should not be the case, exporting multiple objects as a single file without merging should allow ao to cast between objects. This is our primary workflow on Gears, we use a single file with multiple objects in the outliner for the low, and a single file with multiple objects in the outliner for the high. Have you enabled name matching perhaps, as that feature was designed to do what you are describing, but I've never needed to use it, I just explode my mesh if there are overlaps and or use an envelope.
Ganjica 1. There was a bug for a while causing the low to be really slow, but if you just installed it that issue should be fixed. Although my low polies are much lower than yours so maybe I've just never tried it on anything that high poly for the low. Also make sure to close the uv editor before exporting low, this will speed things up dramatically.
2. That should not be the case, exporting multiple objects as a single file without merging should allow ao to cast between objects. This is our primary workflow on Gears, we use a single file with multiple objects in the outliner for the low, and a single file with multiple objects in the outliner for the high. Have you enabled name matching perhaps, as that feature was designed to do what you are describing, but I've never needed to use it, I just explode my mesh if there are overlaps and or use an envelope.
3. No idea about udim, I've never used it.
@Malcom you're THE MAN! I closed the UV editor in Maya and the export process took couple of minutes instead of 20. Amazing! I also had "name matching" enabled. After I disabled it it worked as you said. Amazing (twice)! For the UDIMs it's ok, it works, I just have to do some math.
Hey i dunno how i didn't see this before hand. but how does one load multiple meshes into mightybake at once? neither shift + click in the explorer works, nor dragging a selection into the highpoly field
I tried setting my scene up just like i would with substance designer and it just works meshname_low meshname_cage meshname_high_specification (many more highpolies baked into one lowpoly)
it works flawlessly, here i have no idea how it really works and there is no documentation.
so yeah after ages of a break, i tried it again and the experience has been anything but smooth. right now i guess your hottest competitor is substance designer - maybe knald or handplane i can't say, i will test handplane next if the name matching works there. But as it is right now i already see me baking - again - in maya as there is no easy way to bake many assets at once without exploding and if i have to do that again, i might as well just stick to maya
I agree, Substance's use of the Fbx's "Internal" separation by names, per file is a easy/fast way to keep files to a minimum and cut the need to explode. I'm currently looking into batch baking solutions and given the way substance handles bakes matching by name is very convenient and nice to work with, if Mightybake supported something like this consider my money yours.
I'm currently understanding that Mightybake will bake with matching names, but as long as the meshes are separated/exported into what's going to be matched, if Pillar1 has 4 parts to bake it will need to be 4 files, 8 in total including the high, which is not something I intend or understand why anyone would want to do, please correct me if i'm wrong.
The best and lowest cost to storage/management would have the ability to bake the way Substance handles bakes by matching names, 1 file for the low and 1 for the high, and have the objects names within the file govern the match by name baking. Sorry if this is confusing it's late!
TL:DR Batch baking by name the way Substance handles match by name.
Hey Ootrick, I haven't used name matching much, but I believe it works how you would like. One scene file with multiple meshes inside with naming convention. So a single file for the high poly and a single file for the low poly. I think somewhere in this thread there is a description on how the naming convention works. I only bake a couple assets at a time so I still just explode them, which also works in a single file with separate meshes.
Hey Ootrick, I haven't used name matching much, but I believe it works how you would like. One scene file with multiple meshes inside with naming convention. So a single file for the high poly and a single file for the low poly. I think somewhere in this thread there is a description on how the naming convention works. I only bake a couple assets at a time so I still just explode them, which also works in a single file with separate meshes.
Very nice! Perhaps I misunderstood, I'll test it again. I watched all of your tuts lastnight, great help so thank for for that. I was curious if you've tested any batching or know more about it? I'm sure i'm not the only one who'd a appreciate a quick video or tips on the matter with MightyBake. Cheers!
Ootrick, glad the tutorials were helpful. I really need to create a new series as so many features have been added to the program since I created those initial videos. Sorry don't know anything about batching.
Hello, I'm stuck with a problem of the Curvature maps. Basically it seems the normals aren't taken in consideration when I bake the Curvature, no matter what type of direction I choose. Surface Normals, geometry normals and rounded normals do the same thing. I checked the exported fbx and the normals are correct in theere, so it must be something in mighty bake. Here is a test I did:
AO works properly
Curvature doesn't
I mean, there is a subtle difference between the hard edge and soft edge in the bake, but it's nothing compared to what i was expecting. Samples, blur and rounding options seems to have no effect either. Is it a bug? Am I doing something wrong? Is supposed to come out that way?
I'm running into an issue where my GTX 1070 at the office won't bake anything but a blue flat normal with MightyBake. I get an error using xNormal as well on the latest drivers available.
We have a guy at work on the 1070 using it and no issues, maybe try installing drivers choose advanced, then choose clean install and see if it fixes it. I'm still on the 970 at work.
I can help you do a test tonight when I'm back from work, I have a 1070 at home, but haven't installed latest drivers. It's working fine right now so I'll upgrade to latest tonight and try to bake something and see if I get the same result. At least then you'd know it's an nVidia driver thing and could try to roll back.
Synaesthesia, downoaded latest driver, did a clean install. 375.95, rebooted. Tried a bake and everything was fine. I have the Asus Strix geforce 1070 gtx
Replies
Note - For the low poly base mesh, You ONLY need to sue the low script when baking tangent normal maps. You an use the high script for every other type of map.
This is a really great tool, it's beautifully designed and is saving me tons of time.
At the moment we only have hemissphere AO. Downslope AO only shoots rays from the lower half of the 'env sphere' (upslope only from the upper) giving you directional occlusion that goes only down or only up.
Really useful for things like building weathering (just one sample)
When you say upper and lower are you referring to the upper and lower half of the sphere or hemisphere? If you are talking about the lower half of the sphere, can you try the 'thickness' map bake and see if that gives you what you want? It may be inverted from what you are looking for, but that's easy enough to add.
Hm, I will give it a try next week but it doesn't quite sound right.
For reference this is what I am looking for.
This is generated using Modo's 'Downslope' and 'Upslope' Occlusion settings.
(in this case just 3 different AO Processes (hemisphere, down, up) packed into a single RGB)
jens
I have a bug report. The layers feature has gone missing from the mat id baking. Could really use that feature right now.
this does such a fast awesome job with all my bakes, certainly faster then Mari 3 or VRay (the only other UDIM supported baking engines I've used) but this bug makes curvature maps useless.
I haven't seen it in the other maps yet.
first of all i wanted to second campis request. would be really nice to have. maybe with adjustable settings for each of the rgb channels!?
unfortunately i also seem to run into the same problem as etherealartiste but even worse i can not double check in the moment since my license doesn´t get recognized today (for the second time during the last 3 days). wonder how the system works? i remember i´m not the first one where it happens. that has to become more reliable!!
last but not least (cant double check as well but leave it here) i remember that one of my first bakes (highpoly only) i was able to bake a normal map as well with a quad mesh to get the object space normals. some days later it asked me to triangulate my mesh. only difference which might occured that i used the release in the beginning but switched toi the beta version in between!
Really enjoying Mighty Bake so far, just wondering how the "Matched baking" works as far as name convention. ie how do I have to name my files so it will bake parts separately?
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2386176/#Comment_2386176
neither shift + click in the explorer works, nor dragging a selection into the highpoly field
I tried setting my scene up just like i would with substance designer and it just works
meshname_low
meshname_cage
meshname_high_specification (many more highpolies baked into one lowpoly)
it works flawlessly, here i have no idea how it really works and there is no documentation.
so yeah after ages of a break, i tried it again and the experience has been anything but smooth. right now i guess your hottest competitor is substance designer - maybe knald or handplane i can't say, i will test handplane next if the name matching works there.
But as it is right now i already see me baking - again - in maya as there is no easy way to bake many assets at once without exploding and if i have to do that again, i might as well just stick to maya
Crossed objects do not get rounding.
windows 10 64.
Hi folks,
Just announcing version 1.5.0 is finally out of beta. You can download it here.
Version 1.5.0 – July 2 2016
It would be great, if ID mask could be calculated from object materials (so instead of splitting id per mesh, we could split ID per material/face).
malcolm - yep material seems to bake as ID map, and that is awesome!
So my last question is:
Is there some api, or command line access to MightyBake, that would allow me to bake from external 3d app? I would allow me to execute MightyBake directly from external 3D software.
The studio version has a command line tool that you can use to integrate into a pipeline.
I can't count the amount of times I've managed to write over the last bake I made when I load in a new object. I'm not quite sure how best to implement it but I think if we load in a new high or low mesh then the output path should clear (perhaps this could be an option). I find I accidentally overwrite at least 3 or 4 times a day .. maybe it's just me but it is frustrating.
Also I think the preset system needs a way for us to update or overwrite presets if we make a tweak to them. My preset menu is filled with countless numbered versions of presets as I'm not able to update them.
Small features but they'd really help.
thanks
ben
thanks !
ben
What he said :pleased:
Any update on this?
Did buy this specially for the round corners.
Thanks
@bencowellthomas Did you ever find a proper workflow for getting correct displacements out of MightyBake for offline rendering? I've been messing around with MightyBake but haven't found a good solution just yet.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated!
Thanks.
My work around for now was to smooth the low mesh before baking the displacement. I don't use the shelf tools to export this model as it's too slow. I then export another low mesh using the shelf for the normal maps.
If the smoothing could perhaps be a step within mighty bake that would be great. But then it's depending on the smooth methods (ideally open subdiv) being EXACTLY the same as those in Maya or whichever software you use.
1) When I export high, using the mightybake shelf in maya, timewise is as quick as it can be. When I export low for baking AO, for example, the time spent in exporting the geo is extremely high, so much I though maya was crashed several times before I let it go for enough time. I'm talking about 15/20 mins. for a 100k poly geo split in 4 or 5 objects. Does anyone have the same problem?
2) It seems that the maps are calculated by object. So geoA and geoB will not occlude each other unless they're combined together.
The same principle apply to the other types of maps. This means that I have to merge everything together before I export for mightybake, otherwise I won't obtain the desired results. Merging all the geo together is kinda ok, but I end up with the problem above (waiting ages to have the mesh exported). Is it me doing something wrong?
3) This is more of a feature request. I've been experimenting with "Manual" in the UV tiling. The UDIM naming works great, but it's hard to guess U min, U max etc. It would be great if I could choose the UDIM writing a list, something like "1001-1012, 1026, 1038-1050".
Thanks a lot!
1. There was a bug for a while causing the low to be really slow, but if you just installed it that issue should be fixed. Although my low polies are much lower than yours so maybe I've just never tried it on anything that high poly for the low. Also make sure to close the uv editor before exporting low, this will speed things up dramatically.
2. That should not be the case, exporting multiple objects as a single file without merging should allow ao to cast between objects. This is our primary workflow on Gears, we use a single file with multiple objects in the outliner for the low, and a single file with multiple objects in the outliner for the high. Have you enabled name matching perhaps, as that feature was designed to do what you are describing, but I've never needed to use it, I just explode my mesh if there are overlaps and or use an envelope.
3. No idea about udim, I've never used it.
Thanks a lot for the help!
I'm currently understanding that Mightybake will bake with matching names, but as long as the meshes are separated/exported into what's going to be matched, if Pillar1 has 4 parts to bake it will need to be 4 files, 8 in total including the high, which is not something I intend or understand why anyone would want to do, please correct me if i'm wrong.
The best and lowest cost to storage/management would have the ability to bake the way Substance handles bakes by matching names, 1 file for the low and 1 for the high, and have the objects names within the file govern the match by name baking. Sorry if this is confusing it's late!
TL:DR Batch baking by name the way Substance handles match by name.
http://polycount.com/discussion/comment/2393461/#Comment_2393461
AO works properly
Curvature doesn't
I mean, there is a subtle difference between the hard edge and soft edge in the bake, but it's nothing compared to what i was expecting. Samples, blur and rounding options seems to have no effect either.
Is it a bug? Am I doing something wrong? Is supposed to come out that way?
I have the Asus Strix geforce 1070 gtx