What is everyone's methods for baking/cage editing these days?

tynew

Hey guys,

I'm curious as to what workflow everyone is using. From what I've seen people seem to be using all kinds of workflows. What is the fastest/easiest workflow for yourself?

Tons of crazy stuff like: Exploding meshes with keyframe/edit poly, baking with matching matID, editing cages with push modifiers/edit poly, cageless baking, baking in Max/Maya, using third party scripts/baking tools, baking in xNormal still, baking in Knald or Substance painter/designer.

I've recently done some baking cage editing and I realized how repetitive and tedious it can get. I wasted hours. My current method is making the low poly, exporting the cage from projection modifier and using the old fashion keyframe explode + edit poly/push modifiers. I feel this workflow is extremely outdated. After I've gone through that entire process and exported to do bakes in xNormal for example, I then realize I have a problem with geo/uvs. That causes me to go all the way back to the low poly/UV's and make changes. Then setup the entire explode/cage all over again.

Surely this is not the optimal workflow, and I feel like most of this stuff can be automated elsewhere?

Farfarer

I just bake everything in Modo these days - the cage is simply defined as a morph map for the mesh.

Wrote some push tools for pushing the cage out nicely to keep it square.

WarrenM

Substance Painter. I texture in there anyway, might as well have it bake the maps.

beefaroni

Substance Designer

Match by name + cageless baking = insane amount of time saved on complex weapons. I think just in the studio I probably spend 1/4 to 1/2 the amount of time spent by others depending on the asset. Revisions are also much quicker.

I wish I could record a video showing the process but free time has been spent doing NDA stuff . Hopefully I can when this current personal work is at the low poly.

Dan Powell

I bake my stuff in the same was as you, tynew.

Projection Modifier + Explode inside Max, then export the .SBM files to XNormal.

Works well.. Most of the time. I've noticed that the projection modifier tends to struggle with concave objects, and objects that are hollow - especially if they're cylindrical, which you often either have to skew the cage, or add a lot of LP sides, to avoid waviness

Personally I still do most of my stuff by hand in Photoshop. I'll be looking into Substance soon; occasionally use dDo to get a base for less noisy stuff like metal and plastic

Olli.

Substance is totally my thing right now. In fact there was a few months where I had substance designer just so i could bake in it, and then I would go off and texture in photoshop like im used to. Now im using painter as well for texturing so the new workflow is melding together quite nicely.

Before I started using substance I would use the same exploding mesh + cage bake in 3ds max, and then just baking with 3ds max RTT, but the problem with that is that you always get artifacts in your AO from intersecting geometry, or the AO isnt accurate because youve exploded the mesh and the shape has changed.
Match by mesh name in Substance baker fixes this in one fell swoop, and on top of that you can bake EVERYTHING in one go. Matching the subobject names between high and lowpoly is a bit tedious, but once thats done you just plug the fbx files in to substance and click go. No artifacts, and the AO is accurate to the final shape of the model. Its also lightning fast compared to max RTT because of GPU support.

As for baking normals from images or 2d, I really just use the xnormal plugin for photoshop. Its quick and dirty but gets the job done. I only use it for minor stuff though, and if it what im doing requires more oompf, i'll resort to crazbump or knald.

Ive got some experience from nDo as well but I never really found it that useful. I dont do much 2d->normal converting anyway, and the way quixel tools lag photoshop on larger resolutions makes them quite unusable for me. Also i dont like how it takes control of my layer pallet.


End of the day it really depends on what you work on most. Im a hard surface guy and work mostly on weapons, but I can see how the substance baker might not be as great for someone who does foliage or characters.

Quack!

Match by name/material in Substance Designer 5 and the video in my signature.

Justo

beefaroni wrote: »

Substance Designer
cageless baking

B-but muh 90 degrees corners...Don't you get some artifacts at those sharp places?

Quack! wrote: »

Match by name/material in Substance Designer 5 and the video in my signature.

I thought EQ had proven in the thread you made that that method did not work with complex shapes, since it'd skew them?


I still use xNormal with averaged cages to bake my stuff, but I'm super eager to start changing my ways. XNormal not accepting cages with different vertex index but same total number is ridiculous.

Amsterdam Hilton Hotel

i do keyframes for exploded meshes and create cages with a push modifier.

Fwap

keyframes to explode, cage using max's projection modifier, xnormal.
Additionally polyunwrapper or textools for uv border - smoothing group manipulation.

itzaspace

for the cage i use maya, i like the workflow in maya, you can easy edit the cage there,specially for normal map, the rest of the maps usually in xnormal, i never used susbtance but looks really awesome, i will try it

WarrenM

I should mention I use a cage to bake in Substance. I just find I get better results that way.

Quack!

Justo wrote: »

I thought EQ had proven in the thread you made that that method did not work with complex shapes, since it'd skew them?

You can get very minor skewing which is a simple fix, but it's the best baking method I have used, in terms of quality and time.

There are some caveats, but if I can use it, I do.

Justo

Quack! wrote: »

You can get very minor skewing which is a simple fix, but it's the best baking method I have used, in terms of quality and time.

There are some caveats, but if I can use it, I do.

Nice, I'll do another read of that thread then, your method did look pretty awesome.