Imo as for baking I wouldn't recommend blender for baking purpose I'd rather choose xNormal for that even in hardsurface baking in blender has a subtle gradient on it.
Xnormal? Nah, mate. I haven't baked in Xnormal in years! I use substance Painter or Designer.
The reason I'm asking this specifically if because of Bender's bevel shader.
@melviso Cheers mate. I'll give it a shot when I get some more time to mess around. I used TexTools in Max for many years so I'd love to test this out.
@renderhjs Hey man, I'm an long time Max user whose recently been dipping my toes more and more into Blender. I haven't even got around to testing baking in Blender yet, but was just wondering if it's possible to bake the new 2.8 bevel shader in your baking tools? Or does it have to be baked directly with Cycles? Cheers.
With some of the recent happenings on the Max beta forums I can only laugh when I see what a fantastic job you've done with this toolset as a lone dev. I'll leave it at that.
Welp, after seeing updates on TexTools, HardOps, and MeshMachine I see no reasons to keep 3ds max as the main tool. I guess it's time to learn Blender xD
I think so too, I used 3dsMax for almost 17 years (starting with 2.5) and always relied on the many tools that it came with and they preserved even in newer versions. But after diving deeper into Blender last year I think that it has all the fundamental tools.
Seeing how the foundation is not afraid of changes with the 2.8 release is the biggest difference to Autodesk's 3dsMax which depends greatly on legacy feature support and therefore can not evolve in the same significant way. With blender I can download a new stable 2.79 release every single day with small improvements or new features, that's not going to happen with any of the commercial DCC suites.
The main takeaway with Blender for me is: Learning and investingtime with blender is worthy your time because it is yours to keep & will always be available: you can take it with you to work, at home, on your laptop, at uni, for your friends,.... With 3dsMax you get either locked out because of the subscription only payment model (with regional taxes e.g. here in Australia) or because they might decide to depreciate features & compatibility and not offer legacy versions which breaks addons like TexTools or other commercial plugins.
...These tools do not update any of the UV relax algorithms, though, right?
No it does not, it still uses the internal 'Angle Based' or 'Conformal' unwrapping algorithms. So when you use the 'Iron' tool or the 'Straigh' tools it still uses these underlying flatting modes.
@renderhjs are you going to update your TexTools now for 2.8 because I seen in their log that they will ask every developer to update their addon and hopefully packing in blender will be as good as possible.
That's the idea, at the moment 2.8 only just recently hit alpha status - at this stage major python or addon changes are still planned and its not advised for any of the addon developers to migrate yet. But in small chunks I have already been adding small code changes to TexTools such as dealing with RGBA vertex colors, the beveled normal bake etc. Currently the biggest dealbreaker in 2.8 for TexTools is how they changed the active or selected objects in the API. But it will get updated in the future.
Hi @musashidan ! If you've done some bevel shader baking, would you mind sharing your results? I'm also interested in this
Here is a quick demo, you can just bake on a low poly straight without selecting any high poly. Or you can apply the bevel baking on a high poly or projected source mesh. The bevel shader has a limit of samples which in some cases causes some noise in the normal map but its pretty alight for what it is. Hopefully in the future this sample value can be increased.
Hi @renderhjs, I'm absolutely loving TexTools but I'm having some problems baking my normals/ao. I've got this model split into multiple objects and no matter how I try to bake it (all at once or individual) Blender always crashes if I go above 512x512. I wanted to bake it at 4K so it kind of throws a wrench into the whole thing. Do you have any ideas what could be causing it to crash?
I really like how you've fused external tools to your TexTools, like "UV Squares" being your own "Rectify", and "UV Mesh" reminds me of Rich Colburn's "Surface Follow" addon with 'UVShape.py' that does the same thing.
This has been my all time must have addon in Blender for years, called "Meshlint":
It's not a UV tool per se, but I always check that my low poly mesh doesn't have ngons, before I start UV unwrapping. Sometimes I check for tris and other unwanted things this addon can find from your mesh, especially if it's a character that I'm trying to have mostly quad topology for deformation. It may be a little bit offtopic from what your TexTools is supposed to provide for UVs and texture baking, but what do you think @renderhjs? Could this kind of feature be part of your tool, in your own way? If not, I'm still fine using Meshlint as its own separate addon though.
hi I ve read in Youtube's channel about texel density... could be possilble in TexTOols the same formula (extracted from a comment in youtube ,etc)
calculation of TD :
TD for 2048 is 20.48 ( 2048 px / 100 cm ) TD for 1024 is 10.24 (1024 px / 100 cm). TD for 512 is 5.12 ( 512 px / 100 cm)
Text ools use meter right ? Meters (100 units for example blender unity or maya unit, international measurement is better... ) * amount of texel (see above) / resolution (you want, 2048 for example...) .??
this is the formula ? Measure (meter your want ) * TD (see above) / Resolution (you want) ... but texel density is related to 2048 is 20.40 (px /cm...for 1024 is 10.24 (px/cm) . for 511 res is 5.12 (px/cm). as I mentioned....
so How can I choose my right TD for my assets with this eye dropper ( I am a guy who undersstand the process , but I can not know how to apply with this tool in TexToll , excellent addon )
I chose the resolution I want .1024 px in my case press the first I dropper ...(marked in orange) ... and then teh second eye dropper I ve press is that one (marked in yelllow) that one which says texel or pixel by 1 unit ratio .... ( this last tool is the one I should use it to not calculate manually ) thx.
@rafastrip How big is that model? If each of those bigger square are the equivalent of 1x1 blender unit/m the model would never fit in 1k texture unless you overlap it.
To apply it correctly you should first set te texture size, then apply the checker map texture, and then apply the texel.
@renderhjs Hey mate, is it working in 2.8? My baking rollout is completely blank. If I click on 'create uv mesh' an error pops up and then the baking rollout appears, but all the options are greyed out? I'm 100% this isn't supposed to be the case.
@rafastrip How big is that model? If each of those bigger square are the equivalent of 1x1 blender unit/m the model would never fit in 1k texture unless you overlap it.
To apply it correctly you should first set te texture size, then apply the checker map texture, and then apply the texel.
my object are for example , a simle strcuture , like a wall is 2 to 3 meters... I am working on a template of my level ... planning , I would like to fit measure and planning the placement of my assets ,corridor, boxes , assets and props. .. in the picture that asset is 2.30 cm (2 meters . 30 cm ) the uv projection is "smart" and theen I wnet to the TexTOols jsut to check and learn how to use it.... thx-
@renderhjs Hey mate, is it working in 2.8? My baking rollout is completely blank. If I click on 'create uv mesh' an error pops up and then the baking rollout appears, but all the options are greyed out? I'm 100% this isn't supposed to be the case.
Anyone else tested in 2.8?
"Discourage add-on developers to port their work now since the Python API will still change." Reads from the "Beyond the Code Quest blog post at code.blender.org
So, you'll have to wait till September 19 when the final python API of Blender 2.80 is finished and add-on developers can finally port their add-ons to Blender 2.80. You can still use Blender 2.79b though...
@FourtyNights Thanks man. Makes sense. I have 2.79 installed, but I specifically wanted to test baking the bevel shader which I thought was only available in 2.8.
@musashidan Textools should show you where to get the right build to enable Bevel Shader bakes. It's a 2.79 build from master, not 2.8, which is still super early and unstable!
Just check the text under Textools in the addon panel of the User Preferences, it tells you where to look for the right version.
... I wanted to bake it at 4K so it kind of throws a wrench into the whole thing. Do you have any ideas what could be causing it to crash?
@Podolstein Have a test file that you can send me? Obviously hitting memory limits somewhere - perhaps a different strategy could be applied to avoid using that much memory at once.
...@renderhjs? Could this kind of feature be part of your tool, in your own way? If not, I'm still fine using Meshlint as its own separate addon though.
@FourtyNights I am aware of meshlint, 3dsMax had something similar of a mesh debug view. To be fair with UV's you have at least Angle and Area debugging build in: As well as checker maps with TexTools to check texel density and flow. You have some mip map shaders as well in many 3D packages that display the mip map level.
... TD for 2048 is 20.48 ( 2048 px / 100 cm ) TD for 1024 is 10.24 (1024 px / 100 cm). TD for 512 is 5.12 ( 512 px / 100 cm) Text ools use meter right ? Meters (100 units for example blender unity or maya unit, international measurement is better... ) * amount of texel (see above) / resolution (you want, 2048 for example...) .??
@rafastrip Texel density is not as difficult as I think you assume. A texel is literally a pixel of an image in 3D space, the higher the texel density value the smaller the pixel in the 3D world.
Texel density is literally the density or ratio of pixels per meter. This is not necessarily the same as the size of the texture, since with UV mapping you could create a texture atlas or subsets of your texture or even tiling. A visual example: here in this quake screenshot a tile of the floor of 1 x 1 meter uses a 128 x 128 pixel texture in other words a pixel density of 128 pixels per 1 meter.
In TexTools I calculate this ratio for the selected Mesh faces, or all faces when you have an object selected in object mode. Ignore the texture size setup bit in TexTools - that's only needed for Baking, new checker maps etc. When you want read or apply the TexelDensity just focus on the texel density tool instead. The get and set tools will try to read out the assigned texture of you model (image texture or checker map for example) and calculate the ratio with that in mind. Again the pipette icon returns the ratio, and the 'Apply' button applies the ratio to your object or face selection. The little drop down menu allows to toggle between the UV scale modes, e.g. scale everything as a whole in UV or individually per UV island.
Hey mate, is it working in 2.8? My baking rollout is completely blank. If I click on 'create uv mesh' an error pops up and then the baking rollout appears, but all the options are greyed out? I'm 100% this isn't supposed to be the case.
@musashidan So the key is to use a "Nightly" build of 2.79 which is technically in the 2.8 branch I think but still a 2.79. So when you go to the build bot page https://builder.blender.org/download/ don't download the 2.8 variants as they are currently not compatible. The 2.79 ones though are and have several features the current official stable release of 2.79 does not have.
@FourtyNights Thanks man. Makes sense. I have 2.79 installed, but I specifically wanted to test baking the bevel shader which I thought was only available in 2.8.
Again, use the 2.79 nightly builds from the build bot page, they will allow you to bake the beveled normals. TexTools otherwise hides the bake modes.
@musashidan Textools should show you where to get the right build to enable Bevel Shader bakes. It's a 2.79 build from master, not 2.8, which is still super early and unstable!
Just check the text under Textools in the addon panel of the User Preferences, it tells you where to look for the right version.
michael Knubben: Thanks, you are paying attention sir. The idea is to make a slow transition to 2.80 with the 2.79 nightly builds beieng the next transition target for me.
I was testing
out the 'Bake Bevel' feature of TexTools and no matter how I set it up
there were NM errors. If Blender natively uses MikkT then it should be a
simple case of set the object to smooth and bake averaged. But for
whatever reason if I do this then the map bakes blank. If I use hard
edge/uv split method the map bakes and looks good.
Do you know if the Blender MikkT implementation can work as expected with a fully averaged mesh? Or why the map would be baking blank if fully averaged?
I was testing
out the 'Bake Bevel' feature of TexTools and no matter how I set it up
there were NM errors. If Blender natively uses MikkT then it should be a
simple case of set the object to smooth and bake averaged. But for
whatever reason if I do this then the map bakes blank. If I use hard
edge/uv split method the map bakes and looks good.
Do you know if the Blender MikkT implementation can work as expected with a fully averaged mesh? Or why the map would be baking blank if fully averaged?
If there aren't any hard edges the algorithm probably doesn't find anything that needs to be bevelled would be my guess. I haven't used the feature but from my understanding it just bases the bevel upon hard harsh intersections in the normals so if they're all smooth there should theoretically not be anything to bevel (even if I understand you would want it based on the angles of the geometry instead regardless of normals). Pure speculation but that seems to be what's going on.
After experimenting further, I managed to get non-beveled edges with the tangent bevel bake mode by separating the meshes and checking "Single Texture".
A thousand thank for this since Blender is the poor man of UV tools, i am switching from 3ds max and i miss all these amazing uv tools like the relax and peel mode!
I've started using your TexTools a lot, very helpful indeed. My absolute favourite tools are, "Crop", "Align Edge" and "Rectify" (nice replacement for UV Squares). I guess "Fill" is nice too, but most of the cases it just stretches the UVs to fill the UV space. Could be useful in some cases, but I haven't needed it, yet.
"Sort H & Sort V" are kinda cool, but I wish there were a way to sort them to a specific order I'd like. Sometimes they are more or less organized, but mostly just in a random order, even if it orders them by size too. Like for example, if I have 10 similar UV islands of numbered buttons I'd like to get stacked in a chronological order from left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up. It could be based on a selection order of the UV islands. I select single UV island with "L" key and add or subtract islands with "Shift + L".
Another thing I noticed with + or - 90 degree rotations, that the pivot of the rotation isn't on the center of the island, like it's with Blender's native + and - 90 rotators. Also, TexTools doesn't allow those rotations in UV sync mode, while Blender native tools work just fine. Also, 180 degree rotation -button could be nice too. I use it a lot, so now I have to press 90 degrees twice everytime, haha.
And continuation to "Sort H & V", the operator menu by pressing F6 appears to be uncleaned. It works, but it's a bit "programmer's" artstyle if I can say that, haha. And it says "Align & Sort", even though it's just sorting (well, kinda aligning too, since they're aligned to a perfect row). As far as I know, there's no way to adjust padding without accessing to the F6 operator, or is there? Because I didin't see any settings anywhere after executing the sorting.
GIF I recorded to explain:
In the UVs menu "Fill" is named as "Crop" too, so I guess it should be "Fill" instead, right? Like on the toolshelf.
When baking, is it normal that there isn't any preview at all? When I click on bake, blender gets stuck as if it was frozen then after it finishes the image suddendly appears. Traditionally, without TexTools, while blender was baking the image was progressively appearing as it finished rendering it.
Yup unfortunately no bucket rendering or progress bar when triggered in textools. In part this is also because I need to cue operations after the bake is done. There is a way to trigger the progress bar but its much harder to detect via script when the bake is done.
Perhaps in time I will try to improve this, a quick attempt just earlier kept crashing blender immediately upon baking.
I would like to know how to deal texel density for beach environment. with 2k texture and how to deal with text tool to get clear density.
Hi rafastrip thanks for creating the video, I think its more a concept thing that is perhaps confusing to you as everything you show in the video is correct to me. Perhaps have a watch at this video for a general understanding of texel density
In a nutshell: The texel density descripes how many pixels you see on a 1 square meter face. What you most likely want with your beach is a texel density of say 512x512 or higher.
Here is a visual rundown of what texel density means in your case
I was testing out the 'Bake Bevel' feature of TexTools and no matter how I set it up there were NM errors. If Blender natively uses MikkT then it should be a simple case of set the object to smooth and bake averaged. But for whatever reason if I do this then the map bakes blank. If I use hard edge/uv split method the map bakes and looks good.
I don't know the details unfortunately. Just plugged in the bevel node, if you are curious you can open the bundled blend file with the materials TexTools uses to bake. From the addon preferences and the TexTools addon find the location
Then inside the resources folder open the 'materials_2.80.blend'
Sort H & Sort V" are kinda cool, but I wish there were a way to sort them to a specific order I'd like. Sometimes they are more or less organized, but mostly just in a random order, even if it orders them by size too. Like for example, if I have 10 similar UV islands of numbered buttons I'd like to get stacked in a chronological order from left to right, right to left, up to down, down to up. It could be based on a selection order of the UV islands. I select single UV island with "L" key and add or subtract islands with "Shift + L".
It sorts them by their tallest height or width not area. I think what you are suggesting is a tool that tidies or lines things but orders them by x or y position in their initial selection. Perhaps I can add a operator mode to toggle between 'length' (now) and 'position' (new).
Another thing I noticed with + or - 90 degree rotations, that the pivot of the rotation isn't on the center of the island, like it's with Blender's native + and - 90 rotators.
That is on purpose and the way I like it It angles islands to the top left or top right corner of the inital selection. The idea is that when you manually pack or arrange items you want to move things as little as possible after rotating. Perhaps this GIF illustrates better how I use the rotation tool
And continuation to "Sort H & V", the operator menu by pressing F6 appears to be uncleaned. It works, but it's a bit "programmer's" artstyle if I can say that, haha. And it says "Align & Sort", even though it's just sorting
Will review the copy, usually I prefer entering the labels of the tools in the panel layout code as opposed to the operator class itself as it makes it easier to find existing code based on label names. I probably forgot to update some labels as I copied operator code over time ._.
This is shown when you bake using Anti Aliasing and indicates the actual resolution in memory that will be baked. Previous user feedback showed that someone tried to bake a 10k texture map because of Anti Aliasing and wondered why it kept running out of memory. This should make it more obvious.
Rectify: Support multiple islands
Before:
With the upcomming update the rectify tool can be used among multiple UV islands or partial selections of multiple islands.
Match size tool
New tools for matching width or height of selected islands
I haven't decided yet wehter to space out the items as well with tool or just match the width / height.
Upcoming new thickness bake mode for TexTools. Uses the new 2.8 ao node to bake inverted AO with inverted colors. Controls include AO distance, contrast and samples. This thickness map is useful for realtime SSS shaders.
There are now about 19 bake modes in TexTools when using a nightly 2.79x build of blender. 4 Modes are exclusive to the newer cycles features only available in the 2.8 branch.
How do I remap existing textures to a new UV map? Kind of like how this video does it? Is it possible to do it with your plugin or...?
TexTools for 3dsMax has that feature called 'Transfer' Luckily TexTools for Blender already has some nice UV channel swapping tools. Adding a transfer bake mode should not be difficult. Will have a look this or next week as I agree this mode would be very useful.
On another note: Been experimenting with vertex colors to drive the bevel amount in some of the bake modes - just experimental right now but could be a powerful way to adjust beveling on models. Another idea could be to convert hard edges to vertex colors as a initial pass.
Just wondering, why is it possible that 2 symmetrical uv shell (ie. same size and dimension in 3d space, just in opposite side), after unwrap, rectify and apply texel density, result in 2 different uv shell shape, and neither of them show any sign of stretching?
I came from a Maya background and I don't quite understand why Blender can think they are both low distortion?
Because it's set to 'area', not 'angle'. Area-wise, they both cover the same amount of pixels. If you set it to 'Angle' you'll likely see an entirely different picture.
Because it's set to 'area', not 'angle'. Area-wise, they both cover the same amount of pixels. If you set it to 'Angle' you'll likely see an entirely different picture.
Thx Michael, but if you look closely, I posted both Angle and Area screenshots. I have no clue why they both show deep blue.
Is there some trick to successfully baking a displacement map with this? I can't seem to get anything but a grey image. I'm using the Blender Render engine, as from some searching it's my understanding that the Cycles engine is incapable of baking them.
EDIT: Despite using a cage initially to no effect, I do seem to get results after removing the cage and bumping up the ray distance to an appropriate amount. Not sure why the cage would impact me negatively, though.
EDIT 2: Bumping the raycast distance up to a huge degree washes out the image entirely. I wasn't expecting the ray distance to have any impact, as long as each ray managed to get past the high-poly mesh. Is the displacement measured the distance the return ray travels (and hence would become more similar the further out the ray ends up)?
Without tuning the ray distance precisely it seems this will be problematic in terms of getting full use of the color information.
I am having a problem with the texel density feature, i can't change the checker map neither pick or apply texel density in any object of this file, i tried manually change materials and maps, even reinstall textools too but no luck.
Hey guys, sorry for the stupid question i'm a noob with uvs in blender. With maya there is an option to space/relax a selection of uvs horizontaly or verticaly or even both in once.
Can we do it with textool ? Iron face relax both axes right ?
@shogunato I use an addon called UV Squares to align/grid-align uv islands, and then when I only want to spread a bunch of verts at equal distances without changing their alignment I use Zaloopok's uv Equalise function.
Finally taking the plunge after seeing so many people abandon max (and other apps) to blender. Just grabbed the 2.8 beta, is textools ported to 2.8 at all? Or still in 2.7x?
Great job btw, I've used textools for yeaaaaaaaars in max
As the final release draws closer, more and more addon devs will recompile. I'm not even bothering to unwrap anything in 2.80 until Textools is ported.
Currently Texture baking is broken in 2.8 e.g. normal baking. Also just a few days ago the UV editor got split from the old UV/Image Editor, so there is a lot of construction still going on.
I haven't figured out yet for myself how to deal with the UI, should I go tools, tool panel or property panel or a pie menu etc. Or maybe the context menu - things changed a bit and its not so obvious anymore to addon developers where to best put their interface.
I think I will start soon a new branch in the Git repo for 2.8 but I think that in the next few months the blender foundation will still change a lot in the new UV editor and to the baking backend.
Replies
...
Seeing how the foundation is not afraid of changes with the 2.8 release is the biggest difference to Autodesk's 3dsMax which depends greatly on legacy feature support and therefore can not evolve in the same significant way.
With blender I can download a new stable 2.79 release every single day with small improvements or new features, that's not going to happen with any of the commercial DCC suites.
The main takeaway with Blender for me is: Learning and investing time with blender is worthy your time because it is yours to keep & will always be available: you can take it with you to work, at home, on your laptop, at uni, for your friends,.... With 3dsMax you get either locked out because of the subscription only payment model (with regional taxes e.g. here in Australia) or because they might decide to depreciate features & compatibility and not offer legacy versions which breaks addons like TexTools or other commercial plugins.
Here is a quick demo, you can just bake on a low poly straight without selecting any high poly. Or you can apply the bevel baking on a high poly or projected source mesh.
The bevel shader has a limit of samples which in some cases causes some noise in the normal map but its pretty alight for what it is. Hopefully in the future this sample value can be increased.
calculation of TD :
TD for 2048 is 20.48 ( 2048 px / 100 cm )
TD for 1024 is 10.24 (1024 px / 100 cm).
TD for 512 is 5.12 ( 512 px / 100 cm)
Text ools use meter right ?
Meters (100 units for example blender unity or maya unit, international measurement is better... ) * amount of texel (see above) / resolution (you want, 2048 for example...) .??
this is the formula ?
Measure (meter your want ) * TD (see above) / Resolution (you want) ... but texel density is related to 2048 is 20.40 (px /cm...for 1024 is 10.24 (px/cm) . for 511 res is 5.12 (px/cm). as I mentioned....
so How can I choose my right TD for my assets with this eye dropper ( I am a guy who undersstand the process , but I can not know how to apply with this tool in TexToll , excellent addon
I chose the resolution I want .1024 px in my case press the first I dropper ...(marked in orange) ... and then teh second eye dropper I ve press is that one (marked in yelllow) that one which says texel or pixel by 1 unit ratio .... ( this last tool is the one I should use it to not calculate manually ) thx.
To apply it correctly you should first set te texture size, then apply the checker map texture, and then apply the texel.
Just in case, this addon is somewhat more straightforward for that:
https://blenderartists.org/t/addon-texel-density-checker-1-0-7-update-19-01-18/685566
Have a test file that you can send me? Obviously hitting memory limits somewhere - perhaps a different strategy could be applied to avoid using that much memory at once.
@FourtyNights
I am aware of meshlint, 3dsMax had something similar of a mesh debug view. To be fair with UV's you have at least Angle and Area debugging build in:
As well as checker maps with TexTools to check texel density and flow. You have some mip map shaders as well in many 3D packages that display the mip map level.
@rafastrip
Texel density is not as difficult as I think you assume.
A texel is literally a pixel of an image in 3D space, the higher the texel density value the smaller the pixel in the 3D world.
Texel density is literally the density or ratio of pixels per meter. This is not necessarily the same as the size of the texture, since with UV mapping you could create a texture atlas or subsets of your texture or even tiling.
A visual example: here in this quake screenshot a tile of the floor of 1 x 1 meter uses a 128 x 128 pixel texture in other words a pixel density of 128 pixels per 1 meter.
In TexTools I calculate this ratio for the selected Mesh faces, or all faces when you have an object selected in object mode. Ignore the texture size setup bit in TexTools - that's only needed for Baking, new checker maps etc.
When you want read or apply the TexelDensity just focus on the texel density tool instead. The get and set tools will try to read out the assigned texture of you model (image texture or checker map for example) and calculate the ratio with that in mind. Again the pipette icon returns the ratio, and the 'Apply' button applies the ratio to your object or face selection.
The little drop down menu allows to toggle between the UV scale modes, e.g. scale everything as a whole in UV or individually per UV island.
@ant1fact You're welcome
@musashidan
So the key is to use a "Nightly" build of 2.79 which is technically in the 2.8 branch I think but still a 2.79. So when you go to the build bot page https://builder.blender.org/download/ don't download the 2.8 variants as they are currently not compatible.
The 2.79 ones though are and have several features the current official stable release of 2.79 does not have.
Again, use the 2.79 nightly builds from the build bot page, they will allow you to bake the beveled normals. TexTools otherwise hides the bake modes.
michael Knubben: Thanks, you are paying attention sir. The idea is to make a slow transition to 2.80 with the 2.79 nightly builds beieng the next transition target for me.
I would like to know how to deal texel density for beach environment. with 2k texture and how to deal with text tool to get clear density.
here my video.
mask could be any thing: texture, vertex color etc.
i don't think so, but I could be wrong
Some updates
There are now about 19 bake modes in TexTools when using a nightly 2.79x build of blender. 4 Modes are exclusive to the newer cycles features only available in the 2.8 branch.
Luckily TexTools for Blender already has some nice UV channel swapping tools. Adding a transfer bake mode should not be difficult. Will have a look this or next week as I agree this mode would be very useful.
On another note:
Been experimenting with vertex colors to drive the bevel amount in some of the bake modes - just experimental right now but could be a powerful way to adjust beveling on models. Another idea could be to convert hard edges to vertex colors as a initial pass.
I came from a Maya background and I don't quite understand why Blender can think they are both low distortion?
EDIT: Despite using a cage initially to no effect, I do seem to get results after removing the cage and bumping up the ray distance to an appropriate amount. Not sure why the cage would impact me negatively, though.
EDIT 2: Bumping the raycast distance up to a huge degree washes out the image entirely. I wasn't expecting the ray distance to have any impact, as long as each ray managed to get past the high-poly mesh. Is the displacement measured the distance the return ray travels (and hence would become more similar the further out the ray ends up)?
Without tuning the ray distance precisely it seems this will be problematic in terms of getting full use of the color information.
Does anyone know how to fix it?
Just grabbed the 2.8 beta, is textools ported to 2.8 at all? Or still in 2.7x?
Great job btw, I've used textools for yeaaaaaaaars in max
I haven't figured out yet for myself how to deal with the UI, should I go tools, tool panel or property panel or a pie menu etc. Or maybe the context menu - things changed a bit and its not so obvious anymore to addon developers where to best put their interface.
I think I will start soon a new branch in the Git repo for 2.8 but I think that in the next few months the blender foundation will still change a lot in the new UV editor and to the baking backend.