You can manually edit your "bake" mesh to add
extra geometry to fix skewing and such if you're doing an object space
bake, which does give more control vs a standard cage workflow.
Most
(all?) bakers can use an averaged projection mesh/cage so that's not
really a major benefit to passing OS through handplane.
Good point, I should've said "more control without using a separate bake mesh". Though in terms of extra effort they're (cage vs bakemesh) basically the same — personally I prefer the cage as I find managing a cage with morph maps less cumbersome than a separate baking mesh, and it's not like the added geometry to the final lowpoly mesh is ever a huge deal. Surprisingly some people I talk to still avoid cages entirely in favour of ray distance TS bakes; perhaps having never used cages before they seem like a complicated extra step when they're really very simple.
this made me curious, i dusted off the painter install to give it a try as a baker. had it since they sold it for 50 or thereabouts but am basically a total noob. bear with me (not in the revenant-way).
- it does not seem to write the baked maps to disk directly? you have to wait for all the bakes to finish then export manually?
That's what's so awesome about it. No more annoying bake files on your hdd for no reason, it's all stored in the program until you're finished with your textures. You only export the files you need.
That's what's so awesome about it. No more annoying bake files on your hdd for no reason, it's all stored in the program until you're finished with your textures. You only export the files you need.
well the rendered images i can grab from disk and reuse right away in whatever program, even if the baker is still doing it's thing on another pass. here i have to wait until it becomes responsive again which it does not exactly do a great job at telling me when. should point out that i did not perceive my test bake as very fast either compared to xnormal (12 mil high, 90k low) so it was just sitting there for a good while with the computer locked up.
i was only after trying SP as a baker in my test though since people were gushing over it and i had it sitting around. i found out a while ago in it's current state it's not my preference for texturing as such.
Right, that's fair. But if you're doing the texturing in Painter and don't just use it as a baker it's really nice to not have to deal with a bunch of bake files that you won't really need later on. I can see why you wouldn't want to use it solely for baking though...
looking forward to what it brings to the table. xNormal was a great solution for a super long time, and even more amazing was that it was free. I switched to Knald recently though once they added baking and I cannot bring myself to go back. The biggest issue I have with xNormal is the interface is a huge waste of time. If they can make it a bit more modern and reduce the time it takes to adjust your settings then that alone is a big deal. But right now the $100 for Knald is worth it for the time savings alone imo.
That's what's so awesome about it. No more annoying bake files on your hdd for no reason, it's all stored in the program until you're finished with your textures. You only export the files you need.
well the rendered images i can grab from disk and reuse right away in whatever program, even if the baker is still doing it's thing on another pass. here i have to wait until it becomes responsive again which it does not exactly do a great job at telling me when. should point out that i did not perceive my test bake as very fast either compared to xnormal (12 mil high, 90k low) so it was just sitting there for a good while with the computer locked up.
i was only after trying SP as a baker in my test though since people were gushing over it and i had it sitting around. i found out a while ago in it's current state it's not my preference for texturing as such.
Substance is all GPU based. I've found it to bake lightning fast on my gtx 780 at home. If you don't have a beast of a machine I find that substance falls apart very fast as a solution.
Substance is all GPU based. I've found it to bake lightning fast on my gtx 780 at home. If you don't have a beast of a machine I find that substance falls apart very fast as a solution.
for painting, yes. for baking though? i have a 770 GTX and can't find any setting in SP that looks like it would switch CPU/GPU. my bake must have been happening on CPU. took ages.
Substance is all GPU based. I've found it to bake lightning fast on my gtx 780 at home. If you don't have a beast of a machine I find that substance falls apart very fast as a solution.
for painting, yes. for baking though? i have a 770 GTX and can't find any setting in SP that looks like it would switch CPU/GPU. my bake must have been happening on CPU. took ages.
Hrm are you working with a decimated mesh? I haven't tried an insanely high poly model yet. I will say it's not as fast at baking as xnormal was. But after the cuda option started to freeze my entire machine I switched to the other / slower method anyway. I should mention that I think SP bakes 4k maps no matter what option you have selected in the bake menu. Because when you bake at 512 and then switch later during painting to 4k it does so instantly without re-baking.
Hrm are you working with a decimated mesh? I haven't tried an insanely high poly model yet. I will say it's not as fast at baking as xnormal was. But after the cuda option started to freeze my entire machine I switched to the other / slower method anyway. I should mention that I think SP bakes 4k maps no matter what option you have selected in the bake menu. Because when you bake at 512 and then switch later during painting to 4k it does so instantly without re-baking.
i just reused a typical production lo/high mesh-pair, not exported anything fresh. 12 mio isn't hard to handle for xnormal here at least.
i agree about xnormal and CUDA. having the display lock up for unspecified amounts of time while it's doing it's thing isn't reassuring so i too bake on CPU (i assume that is what you meant with 'other'). with SP i still have a live display when the baker is running so i never had the impression it is taking over the GPU? i did a test at 4k and 1k settings and the bake times and resolution of the finished texture on the model differed noticeably though.
xNormal has been the standard for so long even with the new options of substance painter and knald, given xnormals price point, zero, and how near everyone has learned it, it's not going away easily, it will always have plenty of room for catch up even when it falls behind to the latest apps.
xn 3.20.0 is coming soon ( waiting for Max/Maya 2017 ).
I'm concentrating in xn4, some friends are taking care of the xn3's releases. We're migrating the infrastructure and that's why I was silent and some links/emails are broken. We'll fix that the next week!
xn4 was delayed due to Vulkan, Metal, OpenCL-SPIR, etc... the drivers are a big LOL atm
I don't like Sbs Painter because the Curvature map is a normal map conversion. The only thing that Sbs Painter does better is the Thickness map. It might be slower but I'm sticking with xNormal/Handplane
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well the rendered images i can grab from disk and reuse right away in whatever program, even if the baker is still doing it's thing on another pass. here i have to wait until it becomes responsive again which it does not exactly do a great job at telling me when. should point out that i did not perceive my test bake as very fast either compared to xnormal (12 mil high, 90k low) so it was just sitting there for a good while with the computer locked up.
i was only after trying SP as a baker in my test though since people were gushing over it and i had it sitting around. i found out a while ago in it's current state it's not my preference for texturing as such.
xNormal was a great solution for a super long time, and even more amazing was that it was free. I switched to Knald recently though once they added baking and I cannot bring myself to go back. The biggest issue I have with xNormal is the interface is a huge waste of time. If they can make it a bit more modern and reduce the time it takes to adjust your settings then that alone is a big deal. But right now the $100 for Knald is worth it for the time savings alone imo.
for painting, yes. for baking though? i have a 770 GTX and can't find any setting in SP that looks like it would switch CPU/GPU. my bake must have been happening on CPU. took ages.
i agree about xnormal and CUDA. having the display lock up for unspecified amounts of time while it's doing it's thing isn't reassuring so i too bake on CPU (i assume that is what you meant with 'other'). with SP i still have a live display when the baker is running so i never had the impression it is taking over the GPU?
i did a test at 4k and 1k settings and the bake times and resolution of the finished texture on the model differed noticeably though.
Woah woah woah. Cool news!
The only thing that Sbs Painter does better is the Thickness map.
It might be slower but I'm sticking with xNormal/Handplane