[3DS Max] Baking high polygon texture to low polygon

Wolfer

Hello this question may seem old but need some help. I have it where I have a brick that I have done some extrude to and place a texture to it give it an interesting brick design. Now I want to see since its just a simple square in a way to take that same texture look and put it in a low polygon without having to extrude. I know I can bake the texture but I don't think I'm doing this correct.  I mean doesn't the new square have to have the same umv map as the old one or do I have to make the mapping on my high poly be set to easily place on the low one.

Eric Chadwick

No. Only the lowpoly UVs matter, since the baking tool uses the lowpoly UVs to bake the details from the highpoly.

This might help.
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking

Eric Chadwick

Xnormal can bake a textured highpoly onto your lowpoly I think.

Obscura

That "diffuse texture" really depends on the end application of the asset. If you are going to present it with unlit shader, then you don't even need to delight it, and then its probably good as it is. If you want to use lit shading, you are better removing the diffuse and specular lighting from the scanned texture, or try scanning in uniform, flat lighting, with lot of ambient, and preferably the least possible directionality/specular in the lighting. 

EarthQuake has a nice writeup about this topic:
http://polycount.com/discussion/154396/gnome-3d-scan-technical-writeup#latest

Other than that, yeah, check the texture baking section of the wiki.

Xnormal can bake color map from highpoly to lowpoly, even highpoly vertex colors to a texture. But 3dsmax render to texture - diffuse map also does this (not the vertex color part).

Eric Chadwick

I've baked vertex color in Max, just add a Vertex Color Map to the highpoly's material.

Obscura

Oh yeah that should work.  I forgot about that. You'd add it to the diffuse slot of the hp material and you'd bake diffuse map. Now I tried if simply displaying the vertex colors with the vertex paint modifier would also work with the baking but it does not.

Eric Chadwick

Yeah, this is because the viewport rendering uses a different pipeline than the scanline renderer. It's too bad you can't get vertex color in a material to show properly in the viewport, if you layer it for example. But you can't have it all I suppose.

Wolfer

Thank you for the info everyone.