¿What is the best baker?

ZombieDEV

¿What is the best baker? 
- xnormal
- knald
- crazybump
- In 3dsmax or maya
- In substance painter / Designer
?¿?¿?¿

Synaesthesia

I've had some great results from MightyBake and Handplane. I'm not sure there's a "best" tool for baking textures, but the two I mentioned are certainly feature-rich and work well.

Tetranome

Yeah I've recently moved from xNormal to Handplane, it bakes some awesome normal maps and is pretty flexible.
I still use xNormal for AO though

ZombieDEV

Thanks guys,  I'll try handplane :awesome:

ZacD

Substance works pretty well even without a cage, it's worth trying out. It's really fast and the UI is good. 

MisterSande

MODO bakes are nice as well but can be a pain to setup if you are new to the program. I have heard good things about KNALD and Substance as well. Cannot go wrong with Max manual baking but it seems a bit archaic compared to all the new tools out there.

artquest

If you are texturing in substance painter, nothing can beat baking in there as well

beefaroni

Been doing everything in Substance Designer. Great in a team setting for passing off files and it's easy to composite together multiple bakes with a pre-made graph. 

Joopson

Basically, bake in whatever works for you. They're all roughly at the same level. Just do whatever's best for your workflow.

ZombieDEV

thanks all for answer, thanks  

MmAaXx

I moved from xnormal to substance, because it is not necessary to use cages anymore. Also using proper names on meshes you get amazing id maps.

kanga

I moved from max to xnormal and found xnormal to be very robust and produce way better AO maps. Just about to try out substance designer as it looks amazing.

SergioSantos

Substance is now my main option,
but I still use 3DS Max, since I can do a lot of stuff for Render To Texture
in Materials, UV channels and Lighting that I can't do anywhere else.

Deadly Nightshade

A friend of mine always speaks warmly of Knald

kabir.talib

I use xNormal and im happy with it.. Will try substance for sure.

Kanni3d

It's surprising that people tend to forget that you need to import a cage (which takes that many more steps to generate one, export, import to XN) to bake out some maps. Otherwise, you'd be defaulting to a non-average bake which obviously isn't ideal.

I used to use XN, but do my Normals/AO in 3ds max (match by material id allows me to bake without exploding which is great). Rest of the maps are generated in Substance from those the normals alone.

EarthQuake

Toolbag.

jeffdr

EarthQuake said:

Toolbag.

Tits

EarthQuake said:

Toolbag.

I LOVE YOU PLEASE MAKE THIS A THING

Joopson

Pleaseee.

DShepard

I've tried several different bakers, and they all put out some very good results. However I've been using Knald almost exclusively for while, pretty much because of it's interface. It's just so sleek and fast and I really prefer that to some of the more clunky programs.

ZombieDEV

DShepard said:

I've tried several different bakers, and they all put out some very good results. However I've been using Knald almost exclusively for while, pretty much because of it's interface. It's just so sleek and fast and I really prefer that to some of the more clunky programs.

But i cant buy Knald hahaha

ZombieDEV

I try Knald but.....knald crash if select the "low poly"   all time

Popeye9

I really like Substance Designer. It allows me to bake by mesh name without having to explode my model. I also use Nick Quackenbush's method of baking a average and non average normal map as seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sGC2X6Qazvs&list=FLCnLNyPa4CNmHFZ0HRUCo7w&index=4 

It works for most times but sometimes I still need to make a cage.