What's your go to app for texture baking?

melviso

It's 2016, so what app do you use to bake your normals, displacements, ao, vertex color, cavity and other maps?
I am currently looking into a workflow that enables baking high res maps of up to 32, 64 or even 128k.
Are you still using what you used 8 years ago or have switched to a more recent app to handle this task?

EarthQuake

I use Marmoset Toolbag 3. I think it's pretty cool, but I'm biased.

By 32, 64 or 128k do you mean 32,000x32,000 pixels and up? If so, what are you doing that requires such high resolution?

Bek

Ol' faithful (xNormal)

Sunray

melviso said:

It's 2016, so what app do you use to bake your normals, displacements, ao, vertex color, cavity and other maps?
I am currently looking into a workflow that enables baking high res maps of up to 32, 64 or even 128k.
Are you still using what you used 8 years ago or have switched to a more recent app to handle this task?

knald why do you need so much k?

ZacD

Mostly been using Substance painter. Quick, easy, and you often don't need a cage. Also it's what I texture in so it's one less app. But I definitely need to give Marmoset Toolbag 3 a go, it looks even better. 

Synaesthesia

I've found MightyBake replaces everything I used before, including xNormal. The quality of the results is leaps and bounds ahead of anything else I've tried.

musashidan

S Painter for me. So simple to set up and iterate, and be instantly ready to texture.

I'm also curious why you'd want to bake 128k? This would be where udims come in. None of the game industry aimed apps can do it(SP udims are not truly integrated yet)

Zbrush or Mudbox can bake that res using udims.

NoRank

Normally I use some of substance designer and painter. But I don't really think that they can bake this resolution lol.

I'm testing toolbag 3 aswell.

musashidan

Also, if baking from geometry such as a high res sculpt you have to consider the polys to pixels ratio. For every texture res you step up you need to more or less double your polycount: 1k=2mill, 2k=4mill, 4k=8mill...etc. If you don't then you're just wasting resolution as you wont capture the fidelity.

oglu

if you work with UDIMs its much more memmory efficient than using one single 128k map...
i second mightybake... its also able to bake UDIMs...

radiancef0rge

Toolbag 3

musashidan

Thanks @oglu I wasn't aware mightybake could bake udims. Isn't it a Maya plugin though?

oglu

its standalone... but it does have a export plugin for maya...

melviso

I was looking at a workflow somewhat like photogometry or scanned models where I could have detailed vertex painted textures I can bake to any resolution I want and not having too many materials for say a detailed wall facade. With this, I get one material, one texture for a whole unit that requires it instead of multiple materials/textures to cover one unit keeping my material/texture management simpler.
@musashidan I am guessing it would consume a lot of memory that's why I decided to ask here. I am using a realistic renderer. This workflow isn't for game art so I am thinking 128k for detailing a complete unit in a scene that requires it might not be that bad?

UDIM is efficient but at a point managing the textures can be a handful. Like 32 tiles for a wall facade. I wonder about ptex. Ptex didn't take off as it is not used in most studios' workflow. Why aren't we striving for a resolution independent textures system rather than having to have multiple tiles and materials?
At some point, uv texturing is gonna get old especially with films and games getting more advanced graphically. There has to be something being developed to up the texturing workflow.

EarthQuake

melviso said:

I was looking at a workflow somewhat like photogometry or scanned models where I could have detailed vertex painted textures I can bake to any resolution I want and not having too many materials for say a detailed wall facade. With this, I get one material, one texture for a whole unit that requires it instead of multiple materials/textures to cover one unit keeping my material/texture management simpler.
@musashidan I am guessing it would consume a lot of memory that's why I decided to ask here. I am using a realistic renderer. This workflow isn't for game art so I am thinking 128k for detailing a complete unit in a scene that requires it might not be that bad?

UDIM is efficient but at a point managing the textures can be a handful. Like 32 tiles for a wall facade. I wonder about ptex. Ptex didn't take off as it is not used in most studios' workflow. Why aren't we striving for a resolution independent textures system rather than having to have multiple tiles and materials?
At some point, uv texturing is gonna get old especially with films and games getting more advanced graphically. There has to be something being developed to up the texturing workflow.

I'll be blunt with you. This is a terrible idea.

Realtime or offline rendering, you would be much better off creating a layered material with multiple high res tiles that you blend together to transition between materials and create variation.

To make such a high resolution texture, you would want to do this anyway. There is very little benefit to baking it down to some crazy mega resolution unique map, and very serious drawbacks, like memory usage and general content management.

a 128x128k is 256x larger than 8x8k. An 8K texture is 192mb, a 128x128k texture is 50 gigabytes. That's 200 GB for a simple diffuse/spec/gloss/normal set, and that's for a single material. Are you gonna build a render machine with 16TB of ram or something?

melviso

EarthQuake said:

I'll be blunt with you. This is a terrible idea.
Realtime or offline rendering, you would be much better off creating a layered material with multiple high res tiles that you blend together to transition between materials and create variation.

To make such a high resolution texture, you would want to do this anyway. There is very little benefit to baking it down to some crazy mega resolution unique map, and very serious drawbacks, like memory usage and general content management.

Yeah, I know. I feel that's why Disney created ptex. I think most texture artists who handpaint especially for films would prefer to just paint on one big file. Problem is painting in such high resolution is very laggy. Having multiple textures gets confusing especially if you need to repaint stuff or modify some textures, u have to find the particular texture for the tile. There are other issues using uvs as well.

I completely agree about the memory issue stuff and optimisations neccesary to making things run smoothly on the rendering end. I guess udim is the way to go till some genius comes up with something better.

dzibarik

After trying Marmoset 3 I think I'll switch to it from Substance Painter. They only need to announce pricing. 

oglu

and there is no commercial available tool that is able to paint "direct" into ptex...
all of them are uv based and baking in the end... 
and ptex is geometry bound... no reusing... no modeling on textures stuff... very dangerous...

NoRank

I just don't see a really good reason to use such a high resolution, really dude... Having multiple textures can be a lot more confuse but you actually need to be organized when working lol.

Idk, for me, what you're trying to do sounds way more complicated lol.

melviso

@oglu Might sound complicated but I tend to paint every asset in my scenes uniquely from scratch rather than re-use a texture. Reusing textures and tiling them sort of kills photorealism as in the real world no two items are alike.
If u model on textures already painted with ptex , all you need to do is repaint that part. Like I said, ptex seems tailored towards texture painting artists. Tbh, ptex does need a lot of flexibility so I clearly understand why it can't be used for games especially when you need to keep the number of textures as well as their file size as low as possible.

@NoRank Lol, I know. I am here to learn. Yeah, will be sticking to udim. I was just thinking of photogometry or scanned models and approaching that from a texturing viewpoint.

musashidan

A lot of VFX artists don't bake disp maps, they paint it straight onto the asset, directly in Mari.

What exactly are you trying to do, anyway, that you think you need 128K of res? Even if your final output is an extreme closeup on a 4K screen, 128K would still be a bit crazy. Not to even mention the memory footprint of such a texture!!

melviso

I am using Blender currently for texture painting. Viewport canvas has a gamma issue when saving out textures.
I said maybe even 128k and that was even if the need ever arises. I knew there would be issues if this is done so I decided to ask if this is even possible. Xnormal highest baking output is 32k, I was just curious why that is. Like I mentioned earlier, back to udim.
 I know, imagine 1million resolution texture, the cpu might blow up..lol.

NoRank

As I heard, you can bake with higher resolution on xnormal to resize it in photoshop because it doubles the AA or something like that. I think that's the only reason why you're able to bake this much resolution there. But I might be wrong, didn't really go deep on this technical side.

melviso

Okay, noted. Thanks NoRank.