I've been continuing to learn how to use Blender for this contest, so it took me rather longer than it would do in 3DS Max to get to this high poly stage - I'm still having to look up a lot of shortcuts! I'll add the screws, text and damage in ZBrush.
ZBrush additional details added. The very fine surface details don't need to be added until the Substance Painter stage. For now it's back to Blender to make the game res mesh and uv map it.
I managed to squeeze in the time to finish the low poly model (3350 tris isn't exactly that low! It must be a hero prop) and unwrap it yesterday. I'm not sure what time the deadline is today, but I'll just see how far I can get. I'm now going to split it into the parts that need to have their own projection groups and give handplane baker a go.
When trying to do a test bake - I had made and named all the bake groups I would require, but some of these were empty. When trying to do the test bake I got an error “Baker configuration invalid. Unable to proceed with bake.” Removing the empty bake groups fixed the error, but it would be better if it would just ignore the empty bake groups.
Handplane is saying my low poly mesh from Blender is not fully triangulated. I imported my objs into Blender to check them and they look triangulated to me. A way to permanently dismiss the warnings for each object every time you bake (per session?) would be useful as having to hammer yes for each low poly mesh every time is really tedious. EDIT: I eventually found the suppress triangulation warnings setting in settings. So it’s not obviously there - can we have a disable warnings option in the warning pop-up please?
All of my cages are being marked as red - not matching. There’s no reason I can see for this, I’ve duplicated the mesh I am baking onto and then inflated (Shrink/Fatten) in Blender. I’ve checked keep vertex order the same in the export, but it hasn’t helped.
It does feel like an output previewer is missing - xNormal shows you the textures as it completes them which I like to see.
I had the same problem with faceting on the curvature map as huffer. I also tried using the ray cast settings suggested, but I got a super noisy map.
Please could there be some documentation on floaters somewhere? If there is I couldn’t find it.
Fixing skewed details - my usual workflow for simple props is to make a 2nd cage for any details that have been skewed, then composite together the 2 baked maps in Photoshop. Because the cages are all being marked as not identical by handplane (or Blender is doing something wrong) this method is not working.
I got some weird baking errors that looked like the mesh had been missed - the cages were definitely encompassing the details. I had to make tiny changes to the cages to make them go away. This was very frustrating and makes me want to go back to xNormal.
Things that I like
Good that you can multi select when selecting the high poly models
Very fast to bake tangent space normal map and id map
No need to reload any input files after tweaking them as it loads them from disk
Easy to bake the id map
At this stage I will have to paint out some of the inexplicable bake errors by hand in Photoshop and accept that I do not have time to fix the skewed details.
I checked with xNormal and there is definitely something wrong with my blender cage files, it says the vertex index doesn't match. Are there any blender experts that can tell me what I've done wrong - something in the obj export settings I could've got wrong perhaps? I don't recall having this problem when baking from my previous blender project.
I don't know blender but cage matches are picky and its kind of an opaque problem. If your cages are still getting rejected you should still be able to get a clean bake with the red indicator or with just using type in ray offsets. Try making your cage file a little bigger, not too tight to the model. Sometimes on smaller models the rays don't quite make it to the outside of the cage- I think this is related to the precision limits we are working to fix that affect small models. Also, 99% of the time I just use the ray offset distances as a type in and don't make a cage.
Lastly, try adjusting the backface ray distance in the settings tab. A few of those ray misses look like the backface rays aren't going far enough. This can happen when using a super tight cage because the backray distance is a multiplier of the forward rays. If the starting cage distance is very small, the default of multiplying that number by 5 might not be enough.
There is an option is the settings tab to suppress triangulation warnings. I have also noticed false positives for triangulation warnings, I need to add that bug to the list.
Thanks @putka and @Tamarin, I was determined to finish it on time and the last steps being in familiar software helped a lot. There are several things I'd like to tweak seeing it the next day, but that's my fault for leaving it until the last minute. It was a good software learning experience for me, but there are still some kinks in the workflow - if anyone can enlighten me on why my blender cage files were not matching that would be great (Duplicated mesh, used Shrink/Fatten, exported using identical settings including triangulate and keep vertex order - could the triangulation at the export stage be the issue?). I will definitely use Handplane baker again, especially on complex projects where the multiple projection groups will be important. Being able to save the project is one of the best features. @AlecMoody I had a thought last night about some of those baking errors, and you mentioning the difference between the cage and mesh being too small causing them. This prop was on the small end (I made it to real world measurements), could a mesh scaling option for all meshes in the project fix these problems? For years I've always used a mesh scale of 50 in xNormal. (One more forum newbie question - how are people putting their final images at the top of their thread? Do you edit your first post and add them there?)
I noticed that you were exporting into obj. I also had a similar issue with triangulation errors using obj but after switching to fbx all problems went away. I assumed it was an issue with the Blender obj exporter. I also needed to increase the scale by a factor of 20x.
Thanks, I'll do some experiments and look into this, perhaps it is the obj exporter. I was also going to see if using a triangulate modifier before exporting instead of using the option in the obj exporter would fix it.
Replies
The first step, gathering reference.
For now it's back to Blender to make the game res mesh and uv map it.
Handplane Baker Notes
When trying to do a test bake - I had made and named all the bake groups I would require, but some of these were empty. When trying to do the test bake I got an error “Baker configuration invalid. Unable to proceed with bake.” Removing the empty bake groups fixed the error, but it would be better if it would just ignore the empty bake groups.
Handplane is saying my low poly mesh from Blender is not fully triangulated. I imported my objs into Blender to check them and they look triangulated to me. A way to permanently dismiss the warnings for each object every time you bake (per session?) would be useful as having to hammer yes for each low poly mesh every time is really tedious. EDIT: I eventually found the suppress triangulation warnings setting in settings. So it’s not obviously there - can we have a disable warnings option in the warning pop-up please?
All of my cages are being marked as red - not matching. There’s no reason I can see for this, I’ve duplicated the mesh I am baking onto and then inflated (Shrink/Fatten) in Blender. I’ve checked keep vertex order the same in the export, but it hasn’t helped.
It does feel like an output previewer is missing - xNormal shows you the textures as it completes them which I like to see.
I had the same problem with faceting on the curvature map as huffer. I also tried using the ray cast settings suggested, but I got a super noisy map.
Please could there be some documentation on floaters somewhere? If there is I couldn’t find it.
Fixing skewed details - my usual workflow for simple props is to make a 2nd cage for any details that have been skewed, then composite together the 2 baked maps in Photoshop. Because the cages are all being marked as not identical by handplane (or Blender is doing something wrong) this method is not working.
I got some weird baking errors that looked like the mesh had been missed - the cages were definitely encompassing the details. I had to make tiny changes to the cages to make them go away. This was very frustrating and makes me want to go back to xNormal.
Things that I like
Good that you can multi select when selecting the high poly models
Very fast to bake tangent space normal map and id map
No need to reload any input files after tweaking them as it loads them from disk
Easy to bake the id map
At this stage I will have to paint out some of the inexplicable bake errors by hand in Photoshop and accept that I do not have time to fix the skewed details.
Lastly, try adjusting the backface ray distance in the settings tab. A few of those ray misses look like the backface rays aren't going far enough. This can happen when using a super tight cage because the backray distance is a multiplier of the forward rays. If the starting cage distance is very small, the default of multiplying that number by 5 might not be enough.
There is an option is the settings tab to suppress triangulation warnings. I have also noticed false positives for triangulation warnings, I need to add that bug to the list.
I went ahead and fixed the small errors by hand in Photoshop and I did a quick test of the baked maps in Unity's new look dev mode.
Things have been going much better in Substance Painter this evening.
I have a couple more details to tweak after dinner before I export my textures to Unity.
Wireframe, 3344 tris
Texture breakdown
It was a good software learning experience for me, but there are still some kinks in the workflow - if anyone can enlighten me on why my blender cage files were not matching that would be great (Duplicated mesh, used Shrink/Fatten, exported using identical settings including triangulate and keep vertex order - could the triangulation at the export stage be the issue?).
I will definitely use Handplane baker again, especially on complex projects where the multiple projection groups will be important. Being able to save the project is one of the best features.
@AlecMoody I had a thought last night about some of those baking errors, and you mentioning the difference between the cage and mesh being too small causing them. This prop was on the small end (I made it to real world measurements), could a mesh scaling option for all meshes in the project fix these problems? For years I've always used a mesh scale of 50 in xNormal.
(One more forum newbie question - how are people putting their final images at the top of their thread? Do you edit your first post and add them there?)
For the final images, I just edited my first post.