Synaesthesia, I gave xNormal a try for you, the default bucket renderer worked fine, when I tried the optix cude thing it crashed with an error message.
Synaesthesia, I gave xNormal a try for you, the default bucket renderer worked fine, when I tried the optix cude thing it crashed with an error message.
What error did you get? Sorry about the late response, I was on vacation last week.
Hi there, probably a stupid question, but, if I've an OBJ with separate Objects in it with separate UV-Layouts, how is it possible to get a AO-Map for each object and not one map for both?
First off, I love MightyBake. It has saved me so much frustration even in the short time I've been using it. The UDIM baking is invaluable for what I'm trying to accomplish. I have a character with multiple material ID's for multiple UV maps. It's one mesh so to bake normal maps I either have to do a texture atlas or cut the mesh up into pieces to bake all the maps separately. It's a pain! So instead of doing that, I make a copy of the mesh, set up the UV's as UDIM in Maya, (much easier and quicker than the other workflows), export to Mightybake to bake out my maps. MIghtyBake is very quick to bake out all the UDIM tiles. I then set up the maps back into the different material ID's and PRESTO! Flawless maps without all the extra headaches. This workflow has proved invaluable for me, so thank you guys at Mightybake for saving my a** with your baker. For what I needed to do your program is much cheaper and quicker than the other alternatives that will bake UDIM tiles.
I only have a couple questions. Is it normal for the "Low" export from Maya to save the mesh as 2 objects? When I import the object back in after baking, it opens up as the quad mesh and the triangulated mesh as 2 separate objects. Also, since I am using the assets for Unreal Engine, how does the export from Maya know to triangulate the mesh that way? It doesn't send the object to MIghtybake it only saves it. Should it be sending it to MB? When in Mightybake, I set it to bake for Unreal, but the mesh is already triangulated before that. I hope any of that makes sense.
Hey Swidey, we use MightyBake on Gears to bake all our stuff. What you want to do for Unreal is:
1. Export the low from Maya using the supplied low button on the self. Do not triangulate your mesh before export, also check your .fbx settings and make sure triangulate is turned off before using the low button.
2. Export the high using the high button or whatever workflow you like.
3. In MightyBake choose Tangents MIKK Y Up +
4. This will generate a map that looks wrong in the Maya viewport, but will sync up perfectly with the triangulation of Unreal 4.7+
5. Select your low poly model in Maya and manually export it using the regular file menu, again don't turn on triangulate. Import that model into Unreal and choose use normals or whatever the default options are.
6. Import your normal map and flip the green channel with the tick box in Unreal, you should now have a perfectly synced normal map for Unreal 4 without having to ever triangulate during any part of the process.
7. Note if your normal map seems a little bit wonky on very close inspection in unreal on the mesh try turning on high precision uv's, you have to search for it I think the menu is hidden by default.
Hey Malcolm, thanks for the reply. I watched your videos on youtube about MightyBake. Very helpful and part of the reason I decided to go with MightyBake. Thanks for those! The thing I think I was missing was to export the low mesh un triangulated out of Maya. For some reason I was thinking I needed the triangulated version that exported with the MB Low button. Makes complete sense now.
I flip my green channel -y up from Mightybake since I use Substance Painter to do the rest of the texture process and don't even check how the maps look in Maya. So that part is all good. So I should use Mikkt as the target export instead of Unreal? If that's the case, all good since I was using Mikkt for Substance Painter before anyway when I was using XNormal.
Thanks again for the help and the vids on youtube. Also all your help on the forums here has been very informative as well. I had read pretty much all the posts for MIghtyBake. They should hire you as PR :-)
No problem, I think the only difference between MIKK and Unreal tangent space in MightyBake is one is Y+ and the other is Y-. For import to substance painter I had a hard time figuring out why the maps looked wrong, but correct in Unreal, turns out substance has different low poly normals if you import triangulated vs not triangulated so it's a bit annoying, but I have to export a triangulated file from Maya to work correctly in Substance painter. I have a forum post here on the algorithmic site.
I just purchased an individual license and installed version 1.5.0. I do not see an option to bake to multiple tiles (i.e., UDIM baking). I have check in all of the menus and everywhere else. Where is the option?
I don't use it, but I just checked and the option seems to be missing? You should contact the developer via the link below and see if you get a response. http://www.mightybake.com/support/
Hey Jabba, I use 1.5.0 as well. At the bottom under output settings there is an option named "UV Tiling". Use the drop down and choose "Manual". Then in the next option you can choose the naming convention of the tiles. It only has 2 naming conventions ATM. Either UDIM or Mudbox. I use the Mudbox tile naming convention so I choose that one. Then it has "U Min, Max, V Min and Max". Those are how you set up how many tiles you are using in the U and V directions. Hope that helps.
I am using Maya 2017. I tried using the MightyBake shelf for my High, Envelope and Low resolution meshes. The high and envelope meshes exported just fine. The low resolution mesh export, however, just hangs and locks up Maya. I am unable to use the Low command on the MightyBake shelf. Is anyone else experiencing this? Is there a solution?
I should note that my mesh has udims (1001 through 1010).
I'm wondering the same thing. I'm trying to see if I can fit MightyBake into a Maya/Modo/Mari/Nuke/Redshift/RenderMan pipeline and workflow. I heard about it from some folks over in the Foundry Mari forums so wanted to give it a look.
I want to avoid using Modo's bake system or Mari's conversion nodes to generate normals or maps, and MightyBake's UDIM support looks like a killer feature. But no release notes or news since the July release seems a little odd, unless the roadmap has been completed
Also, I really like the marketing towards studios. Your CLI inclusion looks nice, and support for Linux is very much appreciated, considering a large portion of film studios run on it. CentOS user myself, and I much prefer it to Windows and macOS. I'm curious as to why downloads are available yet System Requirements doesn't list Linux support.
I do have several questions, however:
Do you have any plans of allowing greater than 8K textures? I know that's already massive, but some assets may require that level of accuracy for displacement or really up close environment shots.
Does MB support vector displacement, in contrast to a standard height map? Again, widely used and very useful. Greyscale images can only go so far
Is there planned 'per-patch' support for resolution changes in UDIM workflows? For example, if patch 1013 doesn't need 4K resolution but can get away with 1K, being able to modify that tile's setting would be awesome. Mari does this kind of thing very well. Being able to do this per-map type would also be awesome.
How does MB handle colorspace? Is everything in Linear, or sRGB? Certain maps require raw data that's been unaffected by gamma transforms, so being able to specify these options would be awesome.
Lastly, is there any chance of an official documentation? Having written reference for everything is always appreciated and strongly recommended. It would also allow you to into more detail on what each map does and how it's generated (details like floating point, color space, etc).
I dont know whats happening with the development, but some of your questions can be answered: 1. 8k textures: If working at 16k is required, I suggest using more UDIMs because even Mari starts to become unusuable at this resolution. 2. Per Patch baking would need to be done manually by setting up a presets with specific UDIM ranges and then use Batch Baking. 3. Colorspace: Normal Maps are always srgb and should be used as RAW in Maya. Material ID transfers the colors you give it. But all of the other maps are Scalar so colorspace really doesnt matter.
I am curious about Vector Displacement, because I use Mudbox, and as I understand it from the app, it requires the hipoly and lopoly to have same point order, and does not use Raycasting to calculate the VDM. Is it even possible for MB to bake VDMs?
I personally don't use 16K (but hey, some people possibly do for environments and stuff). I take it your have to do multiple bakes to output the per-patch method as I described? I haven't gotten a chance to sit down and test out MB yet. The topic of colorspace was due to an uptick in interest in utilizing ACES and OCIO, and was wondering if MB has any ability to be compliant or at least offer the ability to specify a target space.
As to VDM, I'm not sure if your method is specific to Mudbox or the concept as a whole. There are tutorials out there for baking in Modo, but I don't remember that being stated in them.
I use Mud as well and as far as I know you can only bake VDM to the same geo you sculpted it on, at least in Mudbox. It would be amazing if you could VDM bake objects to other surfaces like we do with normal maps.
Hey, can anyone tell me where the user presets are stored. I had to move to a different OS and reinstall MIghtyBake. Now all my presets are gone and I would like to migrate them from my old drive to my new one. I can't find them anywhere
I'm trying out different baking software for use with Mari, since modo bake is so slow it's essentailly useless, and I have a couple of questions about MightBake. It looks really cool, especially for UDIMs.
It looks like it doesn't generate concavity where separate poly shells meet. The mesh is combined into one piece of geo, but since this is non game model, there a separate poly shells. Imagine a cube sitting on a plane, combined into one object with the cube and plane separate shells. This is a major bummer and makes it really not worth using for me unless I'm totally missing something.
It also looks like it bases the curvature output on what looks like a vertex map type thing, so if i have a 3 x 3 plane with 9 faces, then i only get curvature data at vertex points. The model is not sub-dividable and built as a vfx asset at a fixed level of detail if that makes sense. Again, I must be missing something here.
I was really stoked to find it, but curvature maps are really all I need. Xnormal does a 100% perfect job at everything I need, but lack of UDIM support kills it.
I'm wondering if anyone can shed some light on this: The curvature maps I'm getting out of MB are drastically different than what I get out of Substance Painter. They look very middle-grey, whereas the SP curvature map has very nice contrast and actually looks like what I'd expect. I'm at a loss because there are minimal parameters to set for the curvature maps in MB and documentation for this product is severely lacking!
commandline tool can only bake one map per process call?(Eg, I have to run the command with options plus one map type, then run the command again after to bake another map type, unlike the GUI?(perhaps that's how it runs under the hood?)
I'm also having an issue with commandline tool "-search" flag, "closest" as a value doesn't seem to apply and I get the result of "furthest"(verified from baking both types via GUI).
How would I bake with commandline if I want to use another GPU? I have two Titan Xs and a 1080, when ooing a bake, a Titan X is used with 57% load, 4GB VRAM and 97% Bus bandwidth(480GB/s?), to run another process of the commandline in parallel(CPU is only at <25% usage), I assume I'd need MB to use another GPU if I want to speed up the batch bake?
Great software so far, is this the support forums the website mentions to go to? I didn't notice anything extra for support beyond the website support page when logged in(which it advises you to do for better support).
Version 1.5.1 Beta has been posted here. It fixes the bugs above with the command line for closest,and a whole lot of other command line details. It also has EGL support on linux, and support for offline license servers.
Hi all, I'm trying mightybake and the edge bevel feature, but I can't seem to get rid of some artifacts. It makes errors on some edges - like if it would flip tangents in the center of the edge. Did anyone encountered something like this ? Interestingly enough, when I tesselate the lowpoly model a bit along the long edge(and bake this modified model), the issue dissapears.
this is the kind of errors I get (I just isolated one part where it happens, but id does it randomly, but it seems that it has problems on meshes with long edges)
this is how the model looks like(for simplicity sake)
this is what fixes it - after rebaking (but I really don't want to go over whole model to manually fix these) Any ideas ?
mightybake Hello! i want to say MB is an awesome tool, My problem is that usually crashes when using OBJ files into the "low" slot. Is this a known issue?
Been a while since I've needed to bake, but fired up one today at work and noticed some weirdness with Unity 5. 3+ tangents with an asset I was working on.
I repro-ed it with a simpler scene:
My usual workflow: 1) Bake out geo/surf normal maps for Maya. Get the map looking good there. 2) Once everything is good in Maya, I bake out the Unity 5.3+ maps and then move into engine (Unity 5.6.3p4)
Generally they look very similar, just some slight differences in the shading.
My Mightybake settings: I also tried updating MB to 1.5.1 RC1, same thing.
Hrmm...May've solved my own issue. I had scale on my low poly models. As soon as I reset it to 1 it baked fine. Could reproduce this with my test and an asset for work.
This seems like a bug? Especially since it is only effecting the outputs for Unity? I also tested fbx and it was the same case as unity.
Hey guys, got a problem with the "envelope" (cage) function, I'm using 3ds Max 2018, I've exported the low, envelope and high meshes as FBXs. I get a bake as if they're isn't a envelope/cage file at all ( it is checked on and search method is on furthest and I tried closest as well).
Anyone know what's going on?
*in xNormal it works fine and detects the cage, so I'm wondering what's going on in Mightybake (I love this app and want to stick with it)
Hi, ok technical issue with Maya - on OSX ( don’t judge me ) after I install the shelf from Mightybake none of the buttons do anything on either 2016 or 2018, really not sure what to do. And I can’t find anything about it. Such a cool tool.
I'm considering buying Mighty Bake but I have an issue with baking out displacement maps that I'm unable to solve in the demo. It seems to disregard the smooth groups for the lowpoly and create other weighted area's on edges.
All the other bakes come out fine, just this one messes up. Has anybody seen this before? Dealt with something like this before?
I notice if I extrude a face outward with its sides directly perpendicular to a surface, thus without making the sides angled, it still gets picked up as a detail in the normal map. But if push the face inward with no angled sides, the indent does not appear on the normal map. It does appear if I angle the sides of the indented face.
Is this the only way to make an indented shape appear? I understand why this may be so, as the rays travel to the indented face and don't "see" the unangled sides. But then why do they see the outward extruded face's sides?
Also, what should I set for "Y Up" for UE4 normal maps? "+" or "-"? And what should this be for MIKT to work in UE4?
If you extrude a face straight down or straight up with no angle the normal map produced should be perfectly flat looking, do you have a slight bevel on the edge maybe?
I replied to your PM about the Y up stuff, but I'll post again here in case someone else finds this. For Unreal use Mikk tangent Y+ then flip the green channel in Unreal, this is my preferred method because I like the normal map to look correct in Photoshop. If you want the normal map to be inverted in Photoshop, but look correct without flipping green, you can use Mikk tangent Y-. I find 3D studio max normal maps hard to look at though so I prefer Y+. This could be because I've primarily used Maya for my career, but both styles are valid.
I need a tool to bake from a super hi res messes 300-500 mil. What's the poly limit for hi res object? I am getting "bad allocation" with 41 Gb hi res object.
Could the tool bake not only from vertex color but from UDIM textured hi poly object to UDIM textured low poly one? Re-bake UDIM textures from one unwrap to another? I see no color texture option at all?
Thanks oglu. I have 32gb of ram. Less than what I am going to load. But for some programs it's not a problem at all. I once baked 700mil in xNormal, the loading took definitely less than 20min, but need a solution with UDIM on both hi res and low res side now. it's a huge piece of terrain from Reality Capture
How is single mesh baking achieved (for a film asset), when I export my subdivided mesh from Maya and plug it into high and low, all I get is black bakes. I want to get the curvature, normals and AO from my high poly to bring into Mari for masking, but what am I doing wrong?
I think the geo can be in a millions, to export you should use the export scripts that come with MightyBake. If you haven't installed them in MightyBake under workflow you can install the Maya shelf there. Also make sure your high rez model has UVs since you're going to be baking to the same model it will need somewhere to strore the data. Also check what version you're on I'm on 1.5.0
Here's my quick test baking to a sub-d model which seems to be working fine except some UV errors which I think are from my sub-d settings.
@abronee It's super key that you use the export options that come with Mightybake. They are doing a bunch of things that aren't user facing and you'll never get a clean bake if you don't.
You have the wrong settings set. In the above post I mentioned you have to turn off the high poly tickbox and plug your high poly into the low poly slot. Basically if you want to bake to the same mesh it's the low poly slot and then you disable the high poly so it just bakes to the one main mesh. Not intuitive I know.
Replies
probably a stupid question, but, if I've an OBJ with separate Objects in it with separate UV-Layouts, how is it possible to get a AO-Map for each object and not one map for both?
I only have a couple questions. Is it normal for the "Low" export from Maya to save the mesh as 2 objects? When I import the object back in after baking, it opens up as the quad mesh and the triangulated mesh as 2 separate objects. Also, since I am using the assets for Unreal Engine, how does the export from Maya know to triangulate the mesh that way? It doesn't send the object to MIghtybake it only saves it. Should it be sending it to MB? When in Mightybake, I set it to bake for Unreal, but the mesh is already triangulated before that. I hope any of that makes sense.
BTW, I am using Maya 2015 and MightyBake 1.5.0
1. Export the low from Maya using the supplied low button on the self. Do not triangulate your mesh before export, also check your .fbx settings and make sure triangulate is turned off before using the low button.
2. Export the high using the high button or whatever workflow you like.
3. In MightyBake choose Tangents MIKK Y Up +
4. This will generate a map that looks wrong in the Maya viewport, but will sync up perfectly with the triangulation of Unreal 4.7+
5. Select your low poly model in Maya and manually export it using the regular file menu, again don't turn on triangulate. Import that model into Unreal and choose use normals or whatever the default options are.
6. Import your normal map and flip the green channel with the tick box in Unreal, you should now have a perfectly synced normal map for Unreal 4 without having to ever triangulate during any part of the process.
7. Note if your normal map seems a little bit wonky on very close inspection in unreal on the mesh try turning on high precision uv's, you have to search for it I think the menu is hidden by default.
I flip my green channel -y up from Mightybake since I use Substance Painter to do the rest of the texture process and don't even check how the maps look in Maya. So that part is all good.
So I should use Mikkt as the target export instead of Unreal? If that's the case, all good since I was using Mikkt for Substance Painter before anyway when I was using XNormal.
Thanks again for the help and the vids on youtube.
Also all your help on the forums here has been very informative as well. I had read pretty much all the posts for MIghtyBake. They should hire you as PR :-)
https://forum.allegorithmic.com/index.php/topic,12828.msg56127.html#msg56127
http://www.mightybake.com/support/
You are right. I am an idiot. I tried everything except scrolling down below the fold. I will tuck my tail and crawl out of the room now
I should note that my mesh has udims (1001 through 1010).
I want to avoid using Modo's bake system or Mari's conversion nodes to generate normals or maps, and MightyBake's UDIM support looks like a killer feature. But no release notes or news since the July release seems a little odd, unless the roadmap has been completed
Also, I really like the marketing towards studios. Your CLI inclusion looks nice, and support for Linux is very much appreciated, considering a large portion of film studios run on it. CentOS user myself, and I much prefer it to Windows and macOS. I'm curious as to why downloads are available yet System Requirements doesn't list Linux support.
I do have several questions, however:
Do you have any plans of allowing greater than 8K textures? I know that's already massive, but some assets may require that level of accuracy for displacement or really up close environment shots.
Does MB support vector displacement, in contrast to a standard height map? Again, widely used and very useful. Greyscale images can only go so far
Is there planned 'per-patch' support for resolution changes in UDIM workflows? For example, if patch 1013 doesn't need 4K resolution but can get away with 1K, being able to modify that tile's setting would be awesome. Mari does this kind of thing very well. Being able to do this per-map type would also be awesome.
How does MB handle colorspace? Is everything in Linear, or sRGB? Certain maps require raw data that's been unaffected by gamma transforms, so being able to specify these options would be awesome.
Lastly, is there any chance of an official documentation? Having written reference for everything is always appreciated and strongly recommended. It would also allow you to into more detail on what each map does and how it's generated (details like floating point, color space, etc).
1. 8k textures: If working at 16k is required, I suggest using more UDIMs because even Mari starts to become unusuable at this resolution.
2. Per Patch baking would need to be done manually by setting up a presets with specific UDIM ranges and then use Batch Baking.
3. Colorspace: Normal Maps are always srgb and should be used as RAW in Maya. Material ID transfers the colors you give it. But all of the other maps are Scalar so colorspace really doesnt matter.
I am curious about Vector Displacement, because I use Mudbox, and as I understand it from the app, it requires the hipoly and lopoly to have same point order, and does not use Raycasting to calculate the VDM. Is it even possible for MB to bake VDMs?
I personally don't use 16K (but hey, some people possibly do for environments and stuff). I take it your have to do multiple bakes to output the per-patch method as I described? I haven't gotten a chance to sit down and test out MB yet. The topic of colorspace was due to an uptick in interest in utilizing ACES and OCIO, and was wondering if MB has any ability to be compliant or at least offer the ability to specify a target space.
As to VDM, I'm not sure if your method is specific to Mudbox or the concept as a whole. There are tutorials out there for baking in Modo, but I don't remember that being stated in them.
Thanks again!
It looks like it doesn't generate concavity where separate poly shells meet. The mesh is combined into one piece of geo, but since this is non game model, there a separate poly shells. Imagine a cube sitting on a plane, combined into one object with the cube and plane separate shells. This is a major bummer and makes it really not worth using for me unless I'm totally missing something.
It also looks like it bases the curvature output on what looks like a vertex map type thing, so if i have a 3 x 3 plane with 9 faces, then i only get curvature data at vertex points. The model is not sub-dividable and built as a vfx asset at a fixed level of detail if that makes sense. Again, I must be missing something here.
I was really stoked to find it, but curvature maps are really all I need. Xnormal does a 100% perfect job at everything I need, but lack of UDIM support kills it.
I'm also having an issue with commandline tool "-search" flag, "closest" as a value doesn't seem to apply and I get the result of "furthest"(verified from baking both types via GUI).
How would I bake with commandline if I want to use another GPU? I have two Titan Xs and a 1080, when ooing a bake, a Titan X is used with 57% load, 4GB VRAM and 97% Bus bandwidth(480GB/s?), to run another process of the commandline in parallel(CPU is only at <25% usage), I assume I'd need MB to use another GPU if I want to speed up the batch bake?
Great software so far, is this the support forums the website mentions to go to? I didn't notice anything extra for support beyond the website support page when logged in(which it advises you to do for better support).
Version 1.5.1 Beta has been posted here. It fixes the bugs above with the command line for closest,and a whole lot of other command line details. It also has EGL support on linux, and support for offline license servers.
Interestingly enough, when I tesselate the lowpoly model a bit along the long edge(and bake this modified model), the issue dissapears.
this is the kind of errors I get (I just isolated one part where it happens, but id does it randomly, but it seems that it has problems on meshes with long edges)
this is how the model looks like(for simplicity sake)
this is what fixes it - after rebaking (but I really don't want to go over whole model to manually fix these)
Any ideas ?
Been a while since I've needed to bake, but fired up one today at work and noticed some weirdness with Unity 5.
3+ tangents with an asset I was working on.
I repro-ed it with a simpler scene:
My usual workflow:
1) Bake out geo/surf normal maps for Maya. Get the map looking good there.
2) Once everything is good in Maya, I bake out the Unity 5.3+ maps and then move into engine (Unity 5.6.3p4)
Generally they look very similar, just some slight differences in the shading.
My Mightybake settings:
I also tried updating MB to 1.5.1 RC1, same thing.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
Dana
This seems like a bug? Especially since it is only effecting the outputs for Unity? I also tested fbx and it was the same case as unity.
Anyone know what's going on?
*in xNormal it works fine and detects the cage, so I'm wondering what's going on in Mightybake (I love this app and want to stick with it)
Thanks for your help!
All the other bakes come out fine, just this one messes up. Has anybody seen this before? Dealt with something like this before?
It could take a while (20min) to load that much data.
How is single mesh baking achieved (for a film asset), when I export my subdivided mesh from Maya and plug it into high and low, all I get is black bakes. I want to get the curvature, normals and AO from my high poly to bring into Mari for masking, but what am I doing wrong?
Thanks
I used the MightyBake export command as advised, and I'm still getting black bakes.