A question about baking entire characters.
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As I'm self teaching myself character art there are a lot of basic things I am missing. One thing I can't seem to figure out is how people bake normals of full characters. I have a knight character with tons of high poly subtools and before I would bake each piece individually and create maps for each piece, but now I want the whole character on one map so I've taken the high and low into Maya, named all the pieces accordingly, made my color IDs, but I can't export the high version. Too many polys. So I wanted to ask, how do you guys go about something like this? How does it work for games? Thanks in advance for all help.
Replies
There are some thing to have in mind if you follow this workflow:
1. Since Zbrush by default doesn't preserve the name of the subtool when exporting so Painter can read the name of the files and identify them you have to uncheck Grp under Export for every subtool before exporting. I've made a little script to do that (it may not be perfect, so if you use it check the last subtool, sometimes it doesn't uncheck Grp for it). You can save it as a txt. and then change it to a zsc. to execute it in Zbrush (I'm asuming you use Zbrush). Zbrush resets the export settings for every subtools if you close the application, so you'll have to use the script to turn off Grp again.
[IButton,"Turn Grp off","Run routine on all subtools",
3. For some reason Subtool Master forces you to add a prefix for the export of the subtools (like ManJacket_high01, ManJacket_high02, etc), so I use another script inside Blender to add the same prefix to the pieces of my lowpoly (ManJacket_low). That should be easy to find even if you use another program like 3ds Max or Maya.
4. I change the name of the subtools I don't want to bake but I don't want to delete to something like "Nope" and hide them so Subtool Master doesn't export them.
Hope you understood my workflow. It may sound overly complicated but it allows me to create a character with a lot of subtools and bake them easily without having to export them one by one or explode them and to be able to change and reexport a single subtool without having to export the whole highpoly again.