Does this exist

Chronicle

Hello all, sorry if I'm in the wrong place for this but I have a question. Is there a piece of software that exists that basically takes a model and multiple textures for it (a diffuse, normal, spec, lightmap, etc) and can combine how each of those maps affect a model into a single map based on how it's currently being rendered?

blankslatejoe

You mean like, something that essentially bakes the specular/normal/lighting information, as lit by the scene, into a static diffuse-only result?

I'm not sure. I've heard of engines baking down information like that for use IN engine..in fact earlier UE3 builds did some combination baking of normal and lightmap on environment assets, if I recall, but if you extracted the maps they weren't particularly useful. I could see how having a "baked accumulated material" would be handy on low-spec/mobile games...but hand-mixing the mapbakes would probably give stronger, more reusable, results.

monster

Render to Texture in 3ds Max and Turtle Renderer in Maya both do exactly that.

In Render to Texture it's called a Complete Map. I'm don't know what it's called in Turtle, but there's a bunch of YouTube videos about it.

Now if you are looking to get a complete map out of Marmoset or a game engine, I don't know of anything that supports this.

Chronicle

Yeah that sounds exactly like what I'm looking for, thank you Monster. I use Maya so I'l look up this Turtle Renderer. That sounds like a plugin I might have to look around for, am I correct in that assumption?

Chronicle

The reason I'm looking for this specifically is that I'm trying to find alternate ways of putting together a hand painted look without necessarily hand painting the whole texture from scratch. The end goal is to be able to use PBR workflow program such as Substance Painter to get the majority of the work done, then add some strokes at the end, that return it to a hand painted look while maintaining shading and colors that are very grounded in reality.

Zeldrik

We did this for work a few years back for the same reason. Using Zbrush high res models to generate a hand painted style single pass texture for the low poly.
We found Modo was by far the easiest and best for this. You can even bake out a layered tif with lightmap, ao, convexity maps all combined into one file.

JedTheKrampus

Turtle comes with Maya, but you may have to make sure that the plugin is loaded before you can use it. Go to Window->Settings/Preferences/Plugin Manager and look for Turtle.mll and make sure it's loaded. However, Turtle isn't a physically-based renderer, so you may have some trouble getting exactly the results that you want from it. Give Turtle a try and see if you get the results you want. If the results aren't to your liking and you don't like the idea of shelling out $1000 for Vray which will take your physically-based maps as input and bake them down to diffuse correctly, you could always export your mesh to Blender and bake things down with the Cycles renderer, which is a really flexible path-tracer that can take physically-based inputs and render them to a texture quite well.

JedTheKrampus

I will actually second Modo for baking as well. It's a really nice renderer for this sort of thing, and the setup is maybe a little easier than Cycles.

Chronicle

Alright thanks everyone, I'll give it a try with Modo then. It handles pbr rendering?

JedTheKrampus

it does, but there's only a normalized Blinn-Phong specular lobe, so it will always be ever so slightly out of sync with the Substance Painter viewport. That shouldn't matter much for baking, though, since you can only really bake the base reflectivity. Mari has a pretty good viewport shader that's pretty close to the Modo renderer out of the box, so you could paint a decimated version of your highpoly model in Mari with a full texture set for Modo's render, then bake down the texture set to your lowpoly model with Modo's renderer, then take the lowpoly back into Mari to finalize it.