I would like the material id map on separate layers too, this is a pain having to cut out each colour in Photoshop when you're done. Will it work on low to low bakes, sometimes I just want to bake the material id out for a single object that does not have a high poly.
@Neox & Malcolm - I've got a build locally with it working. You can now toggle 'layers' on and off for the clown map (material id). It will then output all the layers separately as well as the main composited clown map with material ids. Each layer is black and white (greyscale) and with anti-aliasing. I will roll it into the next build soon.
@Malcolm - If you add your low poly as the high poly, it should just work.
Hey mightybake, just tested this briefly with Unreal 4.7, surprisingly no ill effects? Was MightyBake already using MikkTspace all along? I would have thought my old models would be broken after reimporting them, but this is not the case. Even exported a fresh .fbx with a different name and also baked new normal map.
Also, separate files for id maps is awesome, saves a lot of time comping together in Photoshop. I haven't tried a low to low bake yet, will give that a try this weekend.
okay i am back at testing it, and already got a few feature requests
- in the add highpoly dialogue, please let us pick more than just one mesh at a time
- please keep the last used folder in memory
- i got like 30 highpoly objects, i can#t reach the bake button anymore
so please add an option to open/close the Meshes tabs and
a scrollbar on the side
- i think it would be nice to have the tangentspace option in the Maps tab not the lowpoly tab, this way i could bake 2 maps, one for Maya, one for the target engine
-would be cool if the preview window should show what the baker does, and not just some red (seems to be my workaround with the virtually turned monitor, if i keep it virtually turned i can see the updates)
-seems like meshes from zbrush do not have any smoothing applied
-the unreal4 preset bakes out with a flipped greenchannel
-could you support vertex colors?
Questions
- is it possible to bake an object space map? / ah it does this by default, nice!
-how do i import blocking meshes? i tried using the envelope slot, but it keeps crashing
Yo Neox zbrush obj files don't have smoothing, zbrush doesn't have normals as far as I know. When I open zbrush files in Maya they are all hard edges. Also you can flip the green channel with the Y +/- option in the maps section. We are actually liking the inverted green because it's not inverted for Maya users, plus unreal allows for auto flip green on import if you like, or just change it in MightyBake and it will remember. We have a Maya pipeline so having the Y channel default to Maya style maps is better for us to look at.
I would like to put a +1 for moving the tangent space option/engine type into the map baking rather than the low poly.
you are not wrong about the smoothing, but 90% of our production we handle zbrush files and running multi million polymeshes through another software just to have normals not going to happen. In xnormal there are options to treat this, and i think mightynbake should do the same.
I'll check the Y flip stuff, i just thought its weird, that if your synced target output needs an extra step to make it work
That's interesting, didn't know there was a smooth high poly in xNormal. Is there a load time for that, or does it happen instantly? I've tried bringing the high poly into Maya and smoothing it's painful. I'm a mudbox guy myself so it's not an issue for me, but our studio is some mud some z so that sounds like a great feature.
@Neox - Great feedback! Thanks for trying the latest release. Most of your requests I understand and they sound like good ideas.
A few questions:
1) What would you like the vertex colours to do? Do you mean a bake where you can just bake out the vertex colours?
2) The envelope mesh should handle it for the blocking meshes - What kind of mesh are you using? It only supports FBX. I'll see if I can add a way for you to send me the crash report. I'd love to know where it's crashing.
3) For remembering the last path used - I can definitely do that for empty entries, but for a file that already exists, wouldn't you rather navigate to that location to start? There's a slightly awkward work around. If you copy any paste a file from one entry to another, the file picker will start in that location. it always goes to the location specified in the box.
4) I will add multiple high-res meshes & the smoothing options.
1. zbrush polypaint is basically just vertexcolor we paint a lot in zbrush on stylized production. it almost entirely removes the need for painting in photoshop
2. i just exported some blocker planes, as fbx and i got no error report, but i can check again
3. yes if the file is there already i agree, basically my request would just speed up selecting extra highpolies. Adding many at once will make remove the need i guess.
4. great!
5. in zbrush on a complex character i can easily have many more and combining and exporting the combined meshes is much more complicated then just exporting them out.
In this case, lets say it was a machine made from many many parts which have been sculpted to look used. also it was presplit per material for object ID baking and easy masking (rivets, metals, painted materials, wood, pipes, decals, vents, you name it).
from max or maya you could of course just select them and export em together.
but in max or maya i also don't need to handle tens of millions of polygons in one file
(added - should make it easier)- please keep the last used folder in memory,
(added scroll bar)- i got like 30 highpoly objects, i can#t reach the bake button anymore
so please add an option to open/close the Meshes tabs and
a scrollbar on the side
(added) - i think it would be nice to have the tangentspace option in the Maps tab not the lowpoly tab, this way i could bake 2 maps, one for Maya, one for the target engine
(fixed -was a bug) -would be cool if the preview window should show what the baker does, and not just some red (seems to be my workaround with the virtually turned monitor, if i keep it virtually turned i can see the updates)
(not implemented yet)-seems like meshes from zbrush do not have any smoothing applied
(use the +/- option) -the unreal4 preset bakes out with a flipped green channel
(added) -could you support vertex colors?
I will put out a release soon (after testing) that has these changes in it. I will add the others in the next release after that. Thanks for the feedback.
Hey MightyBake, we are having an issue where using the high button in Maya take 2 minutes to export 2mil tris, using the standard .fbx export takes 1 second. Can you please take a look this seems like a new bug. When I was originally testing the tool I've exported 25mil and have not had to wait this long.
@malcolm - Would you mind deleting your shelf and re-installing it? I've checked the high export on my machine and it's just as fast as the manual one.
We are also having an issue where if the .fbx plugin is not loaded it causes all kinds of problems. Lots of our artists have wasted hours of time trying to debug their bake only to realize they just had to load the .fbx plugin before using the Maya shelf buttons.
I will uninstall the shelf and try again tomorrow when I'm at work.
After reinstalling the shelf, it only takes a couple seconds to export the high, it is still slightly slower than the manual .fbx export, but only by like 2-3 seconds now.
Hey Mightybake, I saw on your roadmap that you're working on curvature map baking, would you be able to put the convexity in the red channel, concavity in the green channel and the curvature map in the blue channel?
Also, the ambient occlusion bake seems really inaccurate and it looks like it is baking through objects instead of occluding them. I tried changing both the search distance in the output settings to 1 and 0 and the distance in the AO specific settings but it doesn't change anything.
When I change the spread distance, it doesn't seem to spread the AO that much either, the default is 160 but when I changed it to 1000 the AO was almost the exact same.
On the roadmap section of your site you should link to this thread too, so if people find your page first they won't have to go digging for the polycount thread.
@gloriousczar - Thanks for posting the image! It's always great to see what people are using MightyBake for. If you get more images you are happy with, please post them.
Regarding the curvature maps - What would you think about having all three written as separate alpha masks? Is there a particular workflow that you need all three packed into the same image? I will likely add an option for both, I'd just like to understand the workflow.
Regarding AO - Thanks for posting this! I just discovered that the distance box on the map settings broke and indeed does nothing. It will be fixed in the next release.
Since the spread is an angle, setting it to higher than 175 won't really do much. Setting it to a narrow angle, will tighten the spread.
The search distance being set to '0' actually means 'automatic'. Sorry, that's an undocumented feature. I should make that clearer. You could try small distances like 0.1, but you may also want to try the envelope, or actually separate the shapes.
Edit: I just did some more testing, and it looks like when you try to go below 1 for the search distance, it just goes to infinite. That's a bug! Thanks for finding it. It will be fixed in the next release. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Looking at your model, your models at the above look almost as high poly as the lower ones. It strikes me that what you want is to bake the AO directly from the low poly instead of first transferring to the high poly. I could add an option to the AO to do this, i.e. not to do a transfer first, but just bake right from the surface. This would mean that the low poly would self occlude and then anything from the high poly would also occlude. I'll add it and you can give it a try and let me know if it does what you want.
MightyBake version 1.3.9 has just been released. You can download it from www.mightybake.com/demo. Just a quick note, this version requires you to respecify some of your presets options. I have made dramatic improvements to the preset system, but it's not backwards compatible. You will only have to do this once. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. 1.4 is coming with Unreal 4.7 and MiKK tangents soon.
1.3.9 Release Notes
(Known Issue) This version is not compatible with all preset options from version 1.3.8 and before, you will have to respecify your presets
(Feature) Vertex colour baking for both OBJ & FBX high poly files
(Feature) Scripts now automatically load the FBX plugin for improved reliability of workflow
(Feature) Now shows all maps being baked, not just the first one
(Feature) Opens file browse dialog to last opened path when opening dialog for empty paths
(Feature) Scroll bar for maps & files section
(Feature) New UI size & improved UI alignments and cosmetic details
(Feature) Moved the tangent space to maps option
(Feature) Added FBX Tangents option to use the raw tangents on the model
(Fix) 8-bit tiff naming bug
(Fix) Remove map crash
(Fix) Remove high-res map crash
(Fix) AO Distance & Search Distance inconsistencies
In regards to the curvature, that's just personal preference. Xnormal packs the cavity and convexity into the R and G channels so I thought it would be cool if you had that, then the curvature in the blue channel as well, so you could bake the map, open it up and pull all 3 maps from the channels window in photoshop.
Good to know you found a few bugs with the AO, I was testing it and changing values on the distance and I thought I was going crazy because it wasn't doing anything haha. Once the distance is fixed, how will the distance in the AO settings be different from the search distance in the output settings?
Sorry, I should have clarified about the images I posted before, the bottom one was the high poly, the top was the low poly + normal map + your AO bake, I was trying to show how mightybake isn't properly occluding from the high poly.
In this image, the left is a Maya AO bake, right is Mightybake AO and the bottom is the low poly + normal map. You can see that Maya's bake occludes parts that are overlapping or close to each other, and has less artifacts. Here's a zip file with my high and low poly models (exported with your mightybake shelf), and Maya and Mightybake AO maps, and the normal map so you can test it if you want and see the difference between the two: http://bit.ly/1GhfdAk
edit: just saw that you added a new version of Mightybake, I'll test it out tomorrow and see how the AO works.
@gloriousczar - Thanks for explaining it in more detail. I've downloaded the file and will take a look. Feel free to remove it if you want.
I think I know what you are looking for, you'd like to bake the AO map directly based off the high-res mesh instead of as a transfer to the low-res one.
If you are using the Maya baker, what do you set your search settings to? Nearest?
@nyx702 - Thank you very much! Right now, the Studio version comes with a command line that can be used with a batch file to do a lot of files at once. Does that do what you are looking for?
Alright I did a bit more testing, I tried baking my AO with a cage (just duplicated my low poly and used transform component) and it did help to get a result more like maya's ambient occlusion, but there were still some artifacts, and it was still baking through the high poly on some parts instead of occluding it.
My maya settings were:
tga
8 bpc
optimization: for multiple objects
128 occlusion rays
occlusion max distance: 0
use mental ray common settings
search method: closest to envelope
max search depth: 0%
delete envelopes on bake: on
match using: geometry normals
Also, I was thinking about the curvature, and yea could you make an option box where when you switch to curvature, you can choose to bake convexity, cavity and curvature, and wether or not you want to channel pack them into one image or bake as 3 separate maps?
I think I found a bug when you try to bake two of the same map types. I was trying to bake one normal map for maya tangents and triangulation and Y+ direction, and a second for UE4 and Y- but it just overwrites the first map instead.
@gloriousczar - You are totally right, baking two maps of the same type will over-write. I will have to figure out how that workflow should work. What do you think about adding _maya or _ue4 to the end of the map names?
I think regarding your AO, I think that I'll add a new searching option that allows you to specify closest to the low poly and that might help fix your problem.
@gloriousczar - I have added a 'closest to surface' option now in the baker. I've tested it on your model and i think the results are much better. I'll see if I can get a version out before the weekend.
@nyx702 - Let me know if you have any questions about the batching. Btw - You can bake multiple maps for a single model out of the regular interface right now. To batch multiple models, we saw that more as something part of professional pipeline, which is why we made the command line mode.
Have you guys thought about integrating this into any of the 3d packages through a toolbar or anything similar at all? The software looks great to me so far and I can imagine it being really fast being able to use it from inside maya.
I would love having an external bake integrated with 3dsmax or maya. Froyo's froxnormal does this very well, you don't even have to leave maya to bake something. It would be cool and even faster to have an integration with max and maybe store settings inside a modifier above Projection (for cage creation), or one-click export high, low and cage, since they're already set up inside the Projection modifier.
@Mathew O & Huffer - It's come up a few times. It's something we'd like to do, but we felt like getting the independent app to a point where the community was happy with everything in it was more important than starting a second UI. We've built other plugins for both Max and Maya before, so it's something we could look at if there was enough demand.
Right now, a technical artist could implement a button that used the studio version's command line interface to do a one-button bake. It wouldn't necessarily be as quick as an integrated plugin, but it is possible.
I'll add it to the roadmap. Thanks for the suggestions folks!
Hi Folks, Rob here to announce MightyBake 1.4.0. We now directly support Mikk tangents (and the unreal 4.7 version of them). You can download it from here.
Release Notes for Version 1.4.0 - Mar 22 2015
(Feature) MIKK Tangent space support
(Feature) Unreal 4.7 Tangent space support (flipped binormal MIKK)
(Feature) Can now choose search method for high to low transfer (Furthest, Closest)
(Feature) New Closest method will find the high res surface nearest the low poly
(Fix) AO clipping bug that would clip the AO to the search distance
(Fix) File named wrong in render window when baking multiple normal maps
(Note) We have started testing with Max -> Fbx -> Unreal. It can work, but it's not as clean as Maya's bake. Export with triangulation, tangents/binormals but no edge flipping. We will continue to work on this and improve Max support over time
We have also added a new search method for the transfer from high to low. you can select from the two methods on the main panel.
Furthest - This is the default and the classic MightyBake surface. the transfer algorithm, it traces backwards from the envelope towards the surface, finding the furthest point on the high poly that will map to the low poly. This is the easiest to use.
Closest - This new method traces out from the low poly to find the nearest high poly surface. It can be very useful for complex, multi-object low-poly models (See the sky hook above that gloriousczar made). It is very powerful, but a little bit harder to use. Make sure there isn't a surface between your low poly and the high poly you want.
Please give it a try and let me know any feedback you have.
Will try this on my next project!
Loading stuff into Xnormal is always a hassle, so it may speed things up a little bit.
Less time dealing with anicent interfaces is more time doing the actual art.
Can anyone attest to the vertex color baking?
Does the baker respond well to vertex colors from Zbrush?
We added vertex colour baking because a Zbrush user wanted to bake colours they had painted. We built mighty bake to read ZBrush's special blend of OBJ so that we could bake them. Feel free to give it a try and let me know if it works well for you.
In the interface you can already specify the direction of the green channel (Y+/Y-), so what does the specific tangent space do in addition to that ? (Since in the tangent space list you have both Mikk and UE4).
@Patoche You are correct. For the savvy user, MIKK with the - tangents turned on is the same thing as the unreal 4.7 option. I just wanted to make sure that the less technical users could just use unreal 4.7 as an option and it would just work, rather than having to learn that unreal 4.7 was MIKK and that the green was flipped.
Since a lot of engines are moving to MIKK, I still wanted to retain it as an independent choice.
Replies
@Malcolm - If you add your low poly as the high poly, it should just work.
I've just uploaded version 1.3.8 to the website. I've added the layered material id (clown) feature. Let me know what you think.
Also, by request, I've changed the demo terms to 30 days rather than 20 bakes.
Also, separate files for id maps is awesome, saves a lot of time comping together in Photoshop. I haven't tried a low to low bake yet, will give that a try this weekend.
okay i am back at testing it, and already got a few feature requests
- in the add highpoly dialogue, please let us pick more than just one mesh at a time
- please keep the last used folder in memory
- i got like 30 highpoly objects, i can#t reach the bake button anymore
so please add an option to open/close the Meshes tabs and
a scrollbar on the side
- i think it would be nice to have the tangentspace option in the Maps tab not the lowpoly tab, this way i could bake 2 maps, one for Maya, one for the target engine
-would be cool if the preview window should show what the baker does, and not just some red (seems to be my workaround with the virtually turned monitor, if i keep it virtually turned i can see the updates)
-seems like meshes from zbrush do not have any smoothing applied
-the unreal4 preset bakes out with a flipped greenchannel
-could you support vertex colors?
Questions
- is it possible to bake an object space map? / ah it does this by default, nice!
-how do i import blocking meshes? i tried using the envelope slot, but it keeps crashing
I would like to put a +1 for moving the tangent space option/engine type into the map baking rather than the low poly.
I'll check the Y flip stuff, i just thought its weird, that if your synced target output needs an extra step to make it work
A few questions:
1) What would you like the vertex colours to do? Do you mean a bake where you can just bake out the vertex colours?
2) The envelope mesh should handle it for the blocking meshes - What kind of mesh are you using? It only supports FBX. I'll see if I can add a way for you to send me the crash report. I'd love to know where it's crashing.
3) For remembering the last path used - I can definitely do that for empty entries, but for a file that already exists, wouldn't you rather navigate to that location to start? There's a slightly awkward work around. If you copy any paste a file from one entry to another, the file picker will start in that location. it always goes to the location specified in the box.
4) I will add multiple high-res meshes & the smoothing options.
1. zbrush polypaint is basically just vertexcolor
2. i just exported some blocker planes, as fbx and i got no error report, but i can check again
3. yes if the file is there already i agree, basically my request would just speed up selecting extra highpolies. Adding many at once will make remove the need i guess.
4. great!
5. in zbrush on a complex character i can easily have many more and combining and exporting the combined meshes is much more complicated then just exporting them out.
In this case, lets say it was a machine made from many many parts which have been sculpted to look used. also it was presplit per material for object ID baking and easy masking (rivets, metals, painted materials, wood, pipes, decals, vents, you name it).
from max or maya you could of course just select them and export em together.
but in max or maya i also don't need to handle tens of millions of polygons in one file
Also, what bit-depth do you need for the vertex colours? is 8 bits per channel enough?
(added - should make it easier)- please keep the last used folder in memory,
(added scroll bar)- i got like 30 highpoly objects, i can#t reach the bake button anymore
so please add an option to open/close the Meshes tabs and
a scrollbar on the side
(added) - i think it would be nice to have the tangentspace option in the Maps tab not the lowpoly tab, this way i could bake 2 maps, one for Maya, one for the target engine
(fixed -was a bug) -would be cool if the preview window should show what the baker does, and not just some red (seems to be my workaround with the virtually turned monitor, if i keep it virtually turned i can see the updates)
(not implemented yet)-seems like meshes from zbrush do not have any smoothing applied
(use the +/- option) -the unreal4 preset bakes out with a flipped green channel
(added) -could you support vertex colors?
I will put out a release soon (after testing) that has these changes in it. I will add the others in the next release after that. Thanks for the feedback.
I can see it in the preview window, but I am unable to open in photoshop. It is missing the .tif extension.
Once I rename the file to include the .tif at the end, then I can open it.
All other file formats are fine.
I will uninstall the shelf and try again tomorrow when I'm at work.
Also, the ambient occlusion bake seems really inaccurate and it looks like it is baking through objects instead of occluding them. I tried changing both the search distance in the output settings to 1 and 0 and the distance in the AO specific settings but it doesn't change anything.
When I change the spread distance, it doesn't seem to spread the AO that much either, the default is 160 but when I changed it to 1000 the AO was almost the exact same.
On the roadmap section of your site you should link to this thread too, so if people find your page first they won't have to go digging for the polycount thread.
Regarding the curvature maps - What would you think about having all three written as separate alpha masks? Is there a particular workflow that you need all three packed into the same image? I will likely add an option for both, I'd just like to understand the workflow.
Regarding AO - Thanks for posting this! I just discovered that the distance box on the map settings broke and indeed does nothing. It will be fixed in the next release.
Since the spread is an angle, setting it to higher than 175 won't really do much. Setting it to a narrow angle, will tighten the spread.
The search distance being set to '0' actually means 'automatic'. Sorry, that's an undocumented feature. I should make that clearer. You could try small distances like 0.1, but you may also want to try the envelope, or actually separate the shapes.
Edit: I just did some more testing, and it looks like when you try to go below 1 for the search distance, it just goes to infinite. That's a bug! Thanks for finding it. It will be fixed in the next release. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Looking at your model, your models at the above look almost as high poly as the lower ones. It strikes me that what you want is to bake the AO directly from the low poly instead of first transferring to the high poly. I could add an option to the AO to do this, i.e. not to do a transfer first, but just bake right from the surface. This would mean that the low poly would self occlude and then anything from the high poly would also occlude. I'll add it and you can give it a try and let me know if it does what you want.
Rob
MightyBake Developer
MightyBake version 1.3.9 has just been released. You can download it from www.mightybake.com/demo. Just a quick note, this version requires you to respecify some of your presets options. I have made dramatic improvements to the preset system, but it's not backwards compatible. You will only have to do this once. I'm sorry for the inconvenience. 1.4 is coming with Unreal 4.7 and MiKK tangents soon.
1.3.9 Release Notes
(Known Issue) This version is not compatible with all preset options from version 1.3.8 and before, you will have to respecify your presets
(Feature) Vertex colour baking for both OBJ & FBX high poly files
(Feature) Scripts now automatically load the FBX plugin for improved reliability of workflow
(Feature) Now shows all maps being baked, not just the first one
(Feature) Opens file browse dialog to last opened path when opening dialog for empty paths
(Feature) Scroll bar for maps & files section
(Feature) New UI size & improved UI alignments and cosmetic details
(Feature) Moved the tangent space to maps option
(Feature) Added FBX Tangents option to use the raw tangents on the model
(Fix) 8-bit tiff naming bug
(Fix) Remove map crash
(Fix) Remove high-res map crash
(Fix) AO Distance & Search Distance inconsistencies
In regards to the curvature, that's just personal preference. Xnormal packs the cavity and convexity into the R and G channels so I thought it would be cool if you had that, then the curvature in the blue channel as well, so you could bake the map, open it up and pull all 3 maps from the channels window in photoshop.
Good to know you found a few bugs with the AO, I was testing it and changing values on the distance and I thought I was going crazy because it wasn't doing anything haha. Once the distance is fixed, how will the distance in the AO settings be different from the search distance in the output settings?
Sorry, I should have clarified about the images I posted before, the bottom one was the high poly, the top was the low poly + normal map + your AO bake, I was trying to show how mightybake isn't properly occluding from the high poly.
In this image, the left is a Maya AO bake, right is Mightybake AO and the bottom is the low poly + normal map. You can see that Maya's bake occludes parts that are overlapping or close to each other, and has less artifacts. Here's a zip file with my high and low poly models (exported with your mightybake shelf), and Maya and Mightybake AO maps, and the normal map so you can test it if you want and see the difference between the two: http://bit.ly/1GhfdAk
edit: just saw that you added a new version of Mightybake, I'll test it out tomorrow and see how the AO works.
I think I know what you are looking for, you'd like to bake the AO map directly based off the high-res mesh instead of as a transfer to the low-res one.
If you are using the Maya baker, what do you set your search settings to? Nearest?
I was looking at the roadmap and is there any plan to add batching?
My maya settings were:
tga
8 bpc
optimization: for multiple objects
128 occlusion rays
occlusion max distance: 0
use mental ray common settings
search method: closest to envelope
max search depth: 0%
delete envelopes on bake: on
match using: geometry normals
Also, I was thinking about the curvature, and yea could you make an option box where when you switch to curvature, you can choose to bake convexity, cavity and curvature, and wether or not you want to channel pack them into one image or bake as 3 separate maps?
I think I found a bug when you try to bake two of the same map types. I was trying to bake one normal map for maya tangents and triangulation and Y+ direction, and a second for UE4 and Y- but it just overwrites the first map instead.
I think regarding your AO, I think that I'll add a new searching option that allows you to specify closest to the low poly and that might help fix your problem.
Thanks for posting the information!
The new AO bake looks clean and sexy
Right now, a technical artist could implement a button that used the studio version's command line interface to do a one-button bake. It wouldn't necessarily be as quick as an integrated plugin, but it is possible.
I'll add it to the roadmap. Thanks for the suggestions folks!
Release Notes for Version 1.4.0 - Mar 22 2015
(Feature) MIKK Tangent space support
(Feature) Unreal 4.7 Tangent space support (flipped binormal MIKK)
(Feature) Can now choose search method for high to low transfer (Furthest, Closest)
(Feature) New Closest method will find the high res surface nearest the low poly
(Fix) AO clipping bug that would clip the AO to the search distance
(Fix) File named wrong in render window when baking multiple normal maps
(Note) We have started testing with Max -> Fbx -> Unreal. It can work, but it's not as clean as Maya's bake. Export with triangulation, tangents/binormals but no edge flipping. We will continue to work on this and improve Max support over time
We have also added a new search method for the transfer from high to low. you can select from the two methods on the main panel.
Furthest - This is the default and the classic MightyBake surface. the transfer algorithm, it traces backwards from the envelope towards the surface, finding the furthest point on the high poly that will map to the low poly. This is the easiest to use.
Closest - This new method traces out from the low poly to find the nearest high poly surface. It can be very useful for complex, multi-object low-poly models (See the sky hook above that gloriousczar made). It is very powerful, but a little bit harder to use. Make sure there isn't a surface between your low poly and the high poly you want.
Please give it a try and let me know any feedback you have.
Rob,
MightyBake
Loading stuff into Xnormal is always a hassle, so it may speed things up a little bit.
Less time dealing with anicent interfaces is more time doing the actual art.
Can anyone attest to the vertex color baking?
Does the baker respond well to vertex colors from Zbrush?
We added vertex colour baking because a Zbrush user wanted to bake colours they had painted. We built mighty bake to read ZBrush's special blend of OBJ so that we could bake them. Feel free to give it a try and let me know if it works well for you.
Rob
Since a lot of engines are moving to MIKK, I still wanted to retain it as an independent choice.