How to bake hair cards with transparency info

samnwck

So I'm trying to bake down a whole bunch of hair cards onto a single plane. I can get the color info but I can't get the planes to cutout just around the edges of the feather where the alpha/transparency is. So as a result you see the edges of the planes. How can I avoid this? Here's a test bake of what I'm talking about:



This was done in Marmoset because of it's ability to bake the materials of the objects below them., perhaps there are other bakers that could do this better?

Eric Chadwick

Some ideas here
http://polycount.com/discussion/198141/is-there-a-maya-solution-for-baking-alpha-planes-to-texture

samnwck

Ahh thanks, I tried searching and couldn't find quite what I was looking for. I see someone was able to get some results in blender, so I'll probably try that next, hopefully I can bake the color info/all the other associated maps as well. 

I brought it up to the marmoset people and they said they might look into it for a future release. It's silly how many hoops are needed to jump through to get something simple like this to work. 

thomasp

looks like the solution over there is for maya, not blender. anyway, would be great to have this ability in toolbag for sure so it's all under one hood.

samnwck

Yeah I saw the solution for Maya, which I don't have at the moment (i know it's free as a student version) but I downloaded blender for other reasons and am now trying to familiarize myself with it and someone mentioned that it was possible to do it within that. 

If (when) I figure it out how to do it, I'll report back. But yeah, having a streamlined way of doing this would be awesome because at the moment this seems a bit more painful than it should be.

bkost

I think you may be doing the workflow a little backwards...Why not have the hair texture set as hair strips? That way you can increase your resolution for each hair card. Then you can apply that single texture to every single card.

Here's a handy guide for baking hair using xgen (you could always just hand paint your hair strands in PS)

poopipe

Unless I misunderstand the OP I think you've misunderstood what they're trying to achieve.

This would primarily be useful for making Lods for assets that use hair cards / foliage etc.. 

bkost

Ahh okay, thanks for the clarification @poopipe

samnwck

Well I suppose LOD could be one use, but more or less just to not have a hundreds of thousands tris used on hair cards. instead I'd like to use that as a base and have some hair cards for variations so it doesn't look too flat.