Baking troubles
polycounter lvl 4
Hi! Im pretty new to 3D (roghly half a year in zBrush) so I'm more or less used to sculpting and other zBrush processes, BUT I know literally nothing when it comes to laying out UV's, texturing and baking maps. For some reason, it became a huge problem for me, somehow I couldnt google enough information so i decided to do everything myself.
So, for starters I've made this sculpt
Then I went through tons of unnecessary operations (such as using zRemesher with polypaint and Guides brush with 0.1 density thinking that I can avoid retopologizing by hand since I never tried that and wasn't really sure I have the knowledge to do that). But either way, I ended up retopologizing everything by hand in Maya.
I understood the process of retopo enough to do all of the parts (and the soft/hard edges), but anyway I had some problems. Therefore, there goes the first question. How do you retopo parts like those reactors?
Or anything that is small and, per say, cylindrical. Do you place the cylinder roughly the same as the highpoly? Do you draw polygons directly on that object? I hope there's more intelligent way of doing this, unlike mine.
The next step, obviously, was laying out UV's. Since i've never tried that also, it became a huge problem. I started out laying out every part of the armor separately (1 object per 1 UV space). Only when I finished I realized how dumb I am. I combined every part and then I saw the mess I've made: UVs for every part overlapped one another. I was like: okay, now I know everything for sure, I'll just lay everything in one UV space. I ended up with this:
Here goes the second question: is it okay to do that? I know for sure, that the layout itself is awfull, I hope I have an excuse since that's the first one I've made so far, I just wanna know if the idea of putting every single part into 1 UV set is correct.
Going forward, I've faced the biggest challenge. Baking made me completely crazy. For some reason, I thought that it's the easiest part and everything i had to do is chill and wait for all the stuff to bake. I had everything retopologized, finally UV'd property (I hope) and combined into one .obj. And the highpoly, ofcourse.
I used xNormal for baking, and the result, obviously, wasn't as satisfying as i thought it would be.
(thats actually an old bake with an old UV set whis is EVEN WORSE (yeah imagine that), but nevertheless, the result with the new one was almost the same, complete mess with tons of artefacts and other bad stuff)
I realized that I didnt really think about areas like this
And also other overlapping areas.
So i was confused: I can't make a map for every separate peace, cause I also want to paint over evertything in Substance Painter, and as far as I'm concerned this way I had to apply different material to EVERY part in Maya, so they wont combine inside Painter and the UVs won't overlap and it would be extremely painful to paint over one piece at a time. On the other hand, I can't bake normal propertly with a single UV set. After some failed attempts of doing things different ways, i thought: can't I do that with a single UV set? So i've come to this conclusion: I've baked every part separately in .png format, then I had something like this:
Not perfect, but much much better and cleaner than it used to be.
I had something like 20 or so normal maps, and then I just combined everything in Photoshop.
In the end, I got pretty much everything I needed. I didn't even think that it could make THAT MUCH trouble, since the model is not complicated at all, but it actually did, and I'm glad I've managed to overcome this. Now, I'm gonna go through the same amount of pain learning to make a decent texture set inside of Substance.
I'd like to know if I was right about certaing things and I really want you to point out my mistakes (I'm pretty sure there are plenty of them here). And I feel like I need to apologize for my bad english.
Thank you.
So, for starters I've made this sculpt
Then I went through tons of unnecessary operations (such as using zRemesher with polypaint and Guides brush with 0.1 density thinking that I can avoid retopologizing by hand since I never tried that and wasn't really sure I have the knowledge to do that). But either way, I ended up retopologizing everything by hand in Maya.
I understood the process of retopo enough to do all of the parts (and the soft/hard edges), but anyway I had some problems. Therefore, there goes the first question. How do you retopo parts like those reactors?
Or anything that is small and, per say, cylindrical. Do you place the cylinder roughly the same as the highpoly? Do you draw polygons directly on that object? I hope there's more intelligent way of doing this, unlike mine.
The next step, obviously, was laying out UV's. Since i've never tried that also, it became a huge problem. I started out laying out every part of the armor separately (1 object per 1 UV space). Only when I finished I realized how dumb I am. I combined every part and then I saw the mess I've made: UVs for every part overlapped one another. I was like: okay, now I know everything for sure, I'll just lay everything in one UV space. I ended up with this:
Here goes the second question: is it okay to do that? I know for sure, that the layout itself is awfull, I hope I have an excuse since that's the first one I've made so far, I just wanna know if the idea of putting every single part into 1 UV set is correct.
Going forward, I've faced the biggest challenge. Baking made me completely crazy. For some reason, I thought that it's the easiest part and everything i had to do is chill and wait for all the stuff to bake. I had everything retopologized, finally UV'd property (I hope) and combined into one .obj. And the highpoly, ofcourse.
I used xNormal for baking, and the result, obviously, wasn't as satisfying as i thought it would be.
(thats actually an old bake with an old UV set whis is EVEN WORSE (yeah imagine that), but nevertheless, the result with the new one was almost the same, complete mess with tons of artefacts and other bad stuff)
I realized that I didnt really think about areas like this
And also other overlapping areas.
So i was confused: I can't make a map for every separate peace, cause I also want to paint over evertything in Substance Painter, and as far as I'm concerned this way I had to apply different material to EVERY part in Maya, so they wont combine inside Painter and the UVs won't overlap and it would be extremely painful to paint over one piece at a time. On the other hand, I can't bake normal propertly with a single UV set. After some failed attempts of doing things different ways, i thought: can't I do that with a single UV set? So i've come to this conclusion: I've baked every part separately in .png format, then I had something like this:
Not perfect, but much much better and cleaner than it used to be.
I had something like 20 or so normal maps, and then I just combined everything in Photoshop.
In the end, I got pretty much everything I needed. I didn't even think that it could make THAT MUCH trouble, since the model is not complicated at all, but it actually did, and I'm glad I've managed to overcome this. Now, I'm gonna go through the same amount of pain learning to make a decent texture set inside of Substance.
I'd like to know if I was right about certaing things and I really want you to point out my mistakes (I'm pretty sure there are plenty of them here). And I feel like I need to apologize for my bad english.
Thank you.
Replies
In the end though, splitting the meshes up and combining in PS is what I do. Just find it easier to get things clean in as few tries as possible.
Also, RE the cylinder, honestly I probably would have just modeled over it and let the NM take care of it, than going of the trouble of modelling out a separate piece. Same with a lot of the small details on this.
Well, it's not really great, but much better then everything i came up with before.Maybe I made everything right eventually, I just wanted people who actually know something about all of those processes to tell me if I made it correct.
Thank you for your response.
My emissive works only if it's white, the base color doesnt seem to affect the glow at all. If I change the color of the emissive channel itself to red, I get this:
So it doen't glow at all. Can someone give me an advice?