[Modo] Vehicle production pipeline for games - Baking Maps

TheCableton

Hey guys!

I'm having trouble figuring out my next steps when it comes to texturing a vehicle for a game and would appreciate some advice.

I have the finished model to the point it's fit for purpose, and I have used the provided materials in Modo 801(SP2) to texture the thing. Now I know I have to render out a number of image maps but this is fairly new territory for me so I would like to ask what maps need to be rendered out and how I would go about doing it.

I'm not sure what other information I should provide here if any, so if I have forgotten to mention something I apologise.

Thanks for the assistance!

Farfarer

So you'll want to do a bit of prep... this reads as a lot, but it'll be second nature in no time.

Set up the edge padding value for your bake. This is in the Final Rendering part of the general system properties of MODO. You'll only need to set that once... 64 should do you fine.

Also set up the size of the bake, for this, go to the render item in your scene, in its properties, scroll right to the bottom and you'll see the bake resolution fields.

Now general stuff...

Firstly, unwrap the low poly mesh. Also be sure that bone of your high poly meshes have a UV map of the same name.

You might also want to give your low poly mesh a morph map and edit it to act as a bake cage.

Now you'll want to set up some render outputs. Depends what you want to get out of i t. Generally you'll want;
Ambient Occlusion
Diffuse Coefficient (that's diffuse color)
Shading Normal (that's world space normals, be sure and tick Remap Pixel Values on it's properties)
Alpha (Modo uses this to add edge padding to the bake)

There's a lot of stuff you can render out

Now you have the low poly selected, and the high poly meshes visible, but not selected.

Then Render > Bake from Object to Render Outputs and select the cage morph map from the drop-down if you're using it, or a day distance if you're not.

TheCableton

Thanks a lot, I'll have a play around with these different outputs and see how things turn out.

I'll be back with results soon, hopefully.

TheCableton

Farfarer, I can't seem to find the field for Edge Padding. System > Preferences > Rendering > Final Rendering was it?

For reference, these are the options I'm given:

Bek

That's the right menu; it's called "Bake UV Border Size" which you currently have set to 3.

TheCableton

Brilliant, thanks!