Baking tutorial recommendations

leltono

Hello people!

I have recently graduated and I can officially say that I'm a game design and development graduate ( 3D prop & environment ), yay! Altough I feel that I have many areas that I am not as familiar with them as I should. 

Specially with baking. While baking i allways find erros that i make in retopology and mapping due to not knowing how baking properly works. So the question is as follows, Do you know any tutorial/paper/post/podcast/ancient magic spell book  that face this topic that might be helpfull?

Thank you kindly.

P.S. In a couple of weeks i will create a thread with my art work if you are interested stay tuned!

Alex_J

I used to have a lot of trouble with baking as well. I feel that I have a layman's understanding of the process now, but I actually found a tool (somebody here told me to try it) that allows me to get perfect bakes consistently even without fully understanding the minute details of the process. The tool is Marmoset Toolbag 3, and although I'm one of those people generally opposed to the idea of using "crutches," the bottom line is, I used to hate and dread baking, now it's like a mindless chore I do on the way to texturing. 

Even if you don't use Toolbag, Marmoset provides some nice tutorials you can find on their site that explain in very artist friendly language what baking is, how it works, how to prepare for it, etc. 

Looking back, I think most of my issues with baking before Toolbag stemmed from not properly preparing my models for baking, and less with my specific baker parameters. Even with Toolbag, you still have to do things right before you get to the baking -- i.e. not too much disparity between high and low; understand the limits of baking very tightly packed together things and separate by grouping, etc.

All that said, even if you get Toolbag and never have a baking issue again, I'd still recommend checking out all of the baking articles here on the wiki and also Marmosets very easy to digest articles as well, just so that you aren't helpless if you have to work without TB3.

JordanN

A Practical Guide On Normal Mapping for Games by Alexey Oshchepkov.

92 pages of pure awesomeness.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B02lElvs8BcvYllmQWpXUGxod3M/view

Eric Chadwick

Alexsey did a great job, but he also cribbed from a lot of places without attribution, which would be nice to add. 

He's abandoned that doc, and hasn't been back on Polycount for a few years now. But there are suggestions and additional info in his original thread. Worth a look: 
https://polycount.com/discussion/146667/a-practical-guide-on-normal-mapping-for-games/p1

musashidan

BIGTIMEMASTER said:

The tool is Marmoset Toolbag 3, and although I'm one of those people generally opposed to the idea of using "crutches," the bottom line is, I used to hate and dread baking, now it's like a mindless chore I do on the way to texturing. 

Haha! Well, isn't it nice for you that you arrived on the scene at a time when the industry finally -after many, many years of hacking - got a universal tangent basis. For the rest of us that have been baking a long time this isn't a 'crutch', it's a f**king godsend. Be happy mate. Don't feel guilty.

FourtyNights

I remember having a lot of trouble getting good ambient occlusion, curvature and thickness bakes from xNormal few years ago, because it had so many settings and it was VERY slow with CPU, even with 512x512 resolution.. but nowadays Marmoset's baker solves everything for me, and it gives tons of bakeable maps. I can bake AO with 4096x4096 with 4096 rays (yes, with that crazy high settings) within an hour, because of GPU powered baking.

Once you get a good low poly topology, UVs, bake groups/IDs (or an explosion, which is an old method nowadays, but it still works) a properly adjusted cage that encompasses your high poly, I can guarantee your bakes are always 110% beautiful and error free when you press the glorious and magical "BAKE" button.