Optimizing bakes?

1813

Alright. Been doing major amount of baking this past week and I've notice that my bakes take about six hours that's a lot of time.

I'm just wondering is there a way to optimize bakes because ambient occlusion takes a considerable amount of time that could be used for working on other things.

It just makes me wonder is there a better way?

huffer

What are you using for baking? 6 hours for rendering only, or including setting up cages, exploding high and low, combining bakes?

1813

Maya. Exploded. 6 hours for rendering my highest map with max settings.

huffer

Oh, Maya is much much slower with higher sampling quality, and there's little improvement from Low to High. If you really need to use Maya you can try baking at double size with Low setting and resizing down; or at least use Medium setting. The fastest option is an external baker like xNormal - at 4K it can finish in 5 minutes. AO is slower (you can use the faster OpenRL setting for AO). The fastest I came across was with Knald or Substance Painter, both AO and normal map take significantly less time then xNormal, and are instantaneous compared to Maya.

1813

Well, That was the plan. Just bake at 4k then double down to 1024 after I've painted the textures.

But if you say they are faster, it looks like I'm gonna have to explore those programs. Thanks!

musashidan

1813 said:

But if you say they are faster, it looks like I'm gonna have to explore those programs. Thanks!

Plus, they are also synced via mikkt tangent space, as is, thankfully, finally becoming consistent across MOST applications (autodesk take note)

JedTheKrampus

Bake at low quality and run a median filter in Photoshop to get rid of some of the noise

EarthQuake

Yeah, use something other than Maya for AO. Literally almost any other baker will be faster. Knald is probably the fastest baker out there currently.