Baking a mesh with multiple PBR materials down to a plane with 1 material - possible?
polycounter lvl 9
Hi there!
I have a complex piece of floor mesh with 9 materials applied as it was easier to assemble that way. I'd like to optimize it further by baking all the information from the texture + the mesh (normal from texture + mesh, albedo from texture, roughness from texture, AO from mesh + textures) into a plane to reduce the draw calls. Is it possible to do in TB3? If so, can someone please explain how?
I have a complex piece of floor mesh with 9 materials applied as it was easier to assemble that way. I'd like to optimize it further by baking all the information from the texture + the mesh (normal from texture + mesh, albedo from texture, roughness from texture, AO from mesh + textures) into a plane to reduce the draw calls. Is it possible to do in TB3? If so, can someone please explain how?
Replies
Do bake a mesh with materials, load the source mesh into the high poly slot, and set up the material for the high poly in Toolbag. Then, in the baker options, select the map types you wish to output.
For the AO map, you could apply that to the abledo slot and bake out an albedo map. AO is calculated from the high poly source, so it will ignore an AO map input in the material. This trick should work for other map types too (like emissive or opacity), but won't work with normal maps.