Which Baker??
polycounter lvl 9
Hey all,
Basically I just wanted peoples input on what the "preferred" baker is nowawdays?
I've used 3dsmax for baking (meh) and since getting Substance Painter I've been trying to use the baker in that (but the lack of a visible cage and other quirks ruin an otherwise decent baker). So that leaves me with
• xNormal
• Knald
• Marmoset TB3
I've tried xNormal very briefly in the past and wasn't a huge fan, but I know it's very popular. Knald looks decent, and the new Marmoset TB3 baker looks to have some great features.
Thoughts?!
Basically I just wanted peoples input on what the "preferred" baker is nowawdays?
I've used 3dsmax for baking (meh) and since getting Substance Painter I've been trying to use the baker in that (but the lack of a visible cage and other quirks ruin an otherwise decent baker). So that leaves me with
• xNormal
• Knald
• Marmoset TB3
I've tried xNormal very briefly in the past and wasn't a huge fan, but I know it's very popular. Knald looks decent, and the new Marmoset TB3 baker looks to have some great features.
Thoughts?!
Replies
There is also Handplane baker: http://www.handplane3d.com/ but I haven't tried that one out yet.
I'll check out handplane3d
I used Marmoset Toolbag 3 for the first time this weekend and I'm fairly confident that I will never bake with any of the other software again.
Handplane is a lot faster than xnormal- The bigger the mesh, the greater the difference in speed. A quick benchmark on my system (i7 4790, files stored on a samsung 840 evo SSD):
20.7 million triangle mesh, object space normals baked at 2k res with no SS
Using a stop watch on xnormal (reported bake times are wrong) from pressing the bake button to having files written I got 1:38
Handplane baker gets it done in 14.5 seconds which In this case that is 6.7 times faster. If you are only baking a million triangles the difference is much smaller. handplane is also faster at AO and curvature than xnormal so even on smaller meshes you should be spending less time waiting around for bakes.
the cool thing about xnormal is/was custom tangent spaces via plugin though. good stuff if you're working with inhouse tech that does not conform to any standard.
- automatic export of low and hi poly meshes in background
- in blender preview of rear/frontal ray distance
- in blender cage setup in non destructive way
- ability to bake only pars of texture that need to be rebaked
- ability to preview bake results in blender,
- only export geo if it was changed.
With SD 6 it also support 8k bakes, and non square textures. I will add skew maps support once they are implemented in batch tools.
Unfortunately it is not free (12$ right now), but it works with trial of SD forever
I would entirely steer clear of baking in Max/Maya. They are outdated for baking, especially with the amount of modern options today. They are also probably the only software still using their own tangent basis whilst everyone else has adopted or natively supports miikt.
Spent some years baking in XNormal, then SPainter, now SDesigner. I never got into the TB3 train because I always textured in Substance and thought that would give me the best bakes to use with their tools because, well, they made those too. Like musashi said, now that SD also feature skew map painting, even if a bit arcaic when compared with TB where you can paint on the model, TB looks even more uninteresting to me now.
Minirant: Seriously, who asked for baking inside Toolbag? Please give us the ability to render stuff reading trim sheets from multiple UV channels that advanced tiling techniques require, not features from another completely different phase of the artwork pipeline. More tools are always welcome, but please focus on rendering, Marmoset. That's your app's forte. What's next, rigging inside TB4?
I hope Allegorithmic will sooner or later add this skewmap feature in Painter and they'll let you paint on the model, but in any case, ever since I adopted baking with skewmeshes I've rarely have had skewing issues, and to be frank I'm surprised to see so many people still talk about baking with cages these days.
And yes, whenever I hear someone from work say he baked anything using Max or Maya, I resist the urge to slap them.
@Revel was that directed at me? i like to avoid fiddling with cages manually, in TB3 it's a slider and perhaps a little paint-tweak if the first bake has holes. which otherwise would require going back to the 3d app and reexport again. in TB3 i can even slip in a new lowpoly mesh and keep my modified cage. painter isn't part of my toolset either.
TB3 is much faster for me but missing some options that Substance has, like ray distance for AO.
Curvature from TB3 is way much more precise, probably it bakes from the high poly mesh instead of calculating the curvature from the normals.
@Revel real-time visualization is awesome, you can clearly see the problem, fix it, and see the updated result instantly. It makes debugging bakes extremely fast and easy. Using bakers that don't have realtime preview just feels like flying blind to me now. Sure you can manually make a cage in Max/Maya, do a test bake, and then set up the bake again in another app, but this is typically a slow process, and if you miss something, it's a pain to debug.
@hansolocambo please shoot an email to support@marmoset.co with a description of the problem, system specs (OS, GPU, etc) and a sample file that is giving you problems and we'll debug it, thanks!
@Prime8 yes, Toolbag 3's curvature map is baked from the highpoly geometry, not generated from the normal map like some other bakers. Generating from the actual geometry means there is no smoothing information baked into the resulting map.
@Justo people talk about cages because you can't bake without a cage. No matter what your workflow is, it involves a cage in some way. You might make it in your 3D app, you might make it in the baker, you might have a distance setting to create it, but to bake a normal map you need a cage/virtual projection mesh that controls the direction and distance of the ray projection. The basics section here: https://www.marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/ covers the concept of cages/projection meshes and applies to all bakers, though some may use different terminology.
In Toolbag on the other hand, you can change your lowpoly mesh topology, uvs, smoothing, etc and simply re-export the file, which will auto update in the baker and retain your settings. The only exception here is that if you make significant changes to your uvs you may need to clear your offset (basically a cage displacement map), and skew maps.
There are some rare outlier cases where you may need to manually adjust specific verts of a cage, but generally I find the cause of this tends to be very extreme geometry (near 180 degree angles and such), and it's often best to adjust the lowpoly so it's not as extreme.
Or am I missing something? Would love to know of a workaround for this as I love the baker in Marmo, and visualizing the cage and all :X