Baking color information maps from geometry to a flat surface?

christopheduron

Hello everyone,

I'm trying to create a ground surface dirt texture that has golden trinkets spread around it. I've made several golden trinkets in zbrush and painted them in SP and then imported them into 3ds max where i use physics to drop them onto a flat plane.

Once i'm happy with my scene i bake the geometry onto a flat texture. Baking the normal map isn't a problem, but how am i supposed to get the albedo, spec, ... maps baked onto the same flat texture?

Thanks in advance.

musashidan

If you're using SP then you'll be painting across the material (all channels at once)

have you baked a matID map?

christopheduron

I think i didn't explain myself correctly. My current situation is this: I've made several high poly models and painted them individually using SP. I then imported all 3 low poly models into 3dsmax and applied the texture i got from SP to them. I now have a multimaterial with 3 submaterials, one for each model.
Then i used 3dsmax physics to drop these trinkets on top of eachother to create a somewhat realistic looking pile of treasure.

What i have now is several hundreds of lowpoly models that i want to project on a flat plane. Can this be done? Originally i thought my normal map bake worked, but it didn't since it only projected the simple geometry and not the normal that was already applied to each individual trinket.

musashidan

Normal map is capturing mesh details, vertex vectors/tangents/bi-normals. But you're trying to bake a normal-mapped lowpoly to another lowpoly? This isn't possible as the bake is capturing the surface normal data, not the normal map.

you need to bake the original highpoly trinkets to the flat surface lowpoly. So you could have used a pro-optimise mod on the trinkets to keep the highres detail but lower the facecount and used that in the physics sim. And then bake your NM.

christopheduron

I feared that might be the case. I'll continue doing that then, thanks .

huffer

Baking color and spec is simple, just tie those to diffuse slot of the material, increase self illumination to 100%, disable reflections and bake a complete map, for the normal map part, you can import the three high res meshes, textured and all, apply a Pro-Optimizer (turn it to Viewport only), then run your physics (keep them instanced) or object paint, and then bake a normal map including all the dropped pieces, the normal map bake will look good, and you'll only use the full geometry at render times, viewport operations should be smooth.