Thanks for the kind words Kanni! That actually means a lot to hear Even though I didn't finish in time, I decided I wanted to finish it anyways. So here are my results.
First, low poly and bakes.
Low poly model
Tangent space normals with wireframe.
Tangent space normals.
AO turned out pretty good!
My curvature map seems to suffer from the same problem other people are having. After baking out at a high resolution, faceting appears to be caused from my high poly.
Here you can see a few tangent space baking errors I had. Most of them appear to be caused by tight crevices where rays intersected with nearby geo. Didn't really have a way around it though. I played with the global ray offset but it didn't seem to help in these situations so I'm not sure what to about it. I was, however, able to bake in Substance Painter and get some cleaner results. What I've come to find is that I agree with pretty much what everybody else is saying about your baker. Overall it's got some pretty cool features but has just a few large glaring issues. The biggest lacking feature being that it doesn't support projection groups based on material IDs. Man! After using that feature in Substance Painter it's hard to want to use anything that doesn't have it! The level of granularity you have in the control over your various maps is pretty crazy though. If it were my goal to achieve absolute perfection in baking results then this is the app I'd use. In its current state it's a bit too cumbersome to be my first choice, but I'm looking forward to seeing version 1.0!
If you want, send the bake files over and I can take a look at why those errors are happening. I'm totally slammed with work right now so it might be a few days until I can take a look: alecmoody@gmail.com
@putka - In Photoshop I traced over the patterns to create masks, then imported them to Zbrush as alphas and stamped them onto the mesh. It wasn't a perfect process so there was some cleanup involved but I got the bulk of the detailing work done that way.
Replies
First, low poly and bakes.
Low poly model
Tangent space normals with wireframe.
Tangent space normals.
AO turned out pretty good!
My curvature map seems to suffer from the same problem other people are having. After baking out at a high resolution, faceting appears to be caused from my high poly.
Here you can see a few tangent space baking errors I had. Most of them appear to be caused by tight crevices where rays intersected with nearby geo. Didn't really have a way around it though. I played with the global ray offset but it didn't seem to help in these situations so I'm not sure what to about it. I was, however, able to bake in Substance Painter and get some cleaner results.
What I've come to find is that I agree with pretty much what everybody else is saying about your baker. Overall it's got some pretty cool features but has just a few large glaring issues. The biggest lacking feature being that it doesn't support projection groups based on material IDs. Man! After using that feature in Substance Painter it's hard to want to use anything that doesn't have it! The level of granularity you have in the control over your various maps is pretty crazy though. If it were my goal to achieve absolute perfection in baking results then this is the app I'd use. In its current state it's a bit too cumbersome to be my first choice, but I'm looking forward to seeing version 1.0!
@AlecMoody - Files have been sent!
http://polycount.com/discussion/183127/stanley-no-43-handplane-from-the-handplane-baker-contest
I'm still looking forward to the final release of the baker though!