SD6 batchtools : curvature-from-mesh bakes look a bit wacky

poopipe

There are lots of lovely new additions to the batchtools (6.0.1) in SD6 and I'm very happy that the commands have been consolidated into neat groups that are easier to write code around.

but

is curvature-from-mesh broken ?

I'm working on meshes exported from Maya with metres for units, 
Relevant parameters being passed into sbsbaker are...
--relative-to-bbox false --intensity 1.0001 --soft-saturate false --maximize-range false

As you can see by the attached examples the curvature bake is basically garbage - changing the intensity to 0.0001 gets you back to something resembling an expected result but that's silly. All other maps are baking out really nicely

I'm getting the same results in designer  - painter 2.5.3 produces results I'd expect (ie. mostly grey rather than massively crushed black and white values) - I guess that's not been updated to use the same bakers yet..

Any Ideas ?

ta

Céline

Hi Poopipe,

This could be an issue with your meshe's geometry.
Do you mind sharing your high and low poly ? I would like to run tests on them.

Thanks !  

poopipe

Hi Celine

I can't share the geometry unfortunately (its work rather than personal )  

I did manage to track it down to the unit settings in Maya.

sbsbaker seems to expect the models to come with centimeters as a base unit  whereas we work in meters here. I'm getting much more sensible results by forcing the unit conversion at fbx export time.

Céline

Ok so can you try to extract only one piece of your mesh (as on the following picture) and bake it. Can you also check the geometry : duplicated edge, lamina face, any issue with the geometry.
Changing units shouldn't affect the render unless your model is too small or too big to be baked.

marks

I've had very similar issue with this also, obviously not using the same geometry.

poopipe

yeah , sorry I never came back to this thread, 

the problem seems to be related to the units set at export time in Maya - if your scene is set to metres rather than centimetres as the base unit then all the size related maps are thrown out.  you can bake using relative to BB fine but as soon as you try and work in world space it all goes silly. 

Setting up unit conversion correctly in your FBX settings will solve it.  

The thing is, there are enough issues associated with trying to bake everything in world space that I've pretty much given up on the idea. If I get some time at work I'll try to write up the problems and submit them directly.