Complications with Baking [Solved!]
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Hi all,
I'm currently working on a resubmission project for my place of study after an injury last year made it difficult to complete my work. As part of my new assignment, I've been instructed to create four assets to use as collectables in a simple game of my own design. For my collectables, I made the following four assets: a trash bag, a wheelie bin, a food caddy and a union badge (the games theme is very bin orientated!). Creating the assets went fine, but I went to texture them and for some reason substance is having problems baking them and I have a bad feeling I might have made mistakes with the meshes. They've all been uv mapped and with two versions created (high poly and low poly). I created cages for two of them but the cages seemed to be making problems worse rather then improving them.
When I try to bake the meshes in substance painter I get the following warnings:
"Could not find vertex colours"
"Not enough data in the high poly to use selected baker. Aborting bake."
Could this be due to a lack of cage (for some of them) or is this a more complicated problem? And if thats the case, are the meshes salvageable as I don't have much time to complete this project! (I also have to do blueprinting which is going to take me a long time!)
Calyx
P.S. If it helps, I can provide the files as need be.
I'm currently working on a resubmission project for my place of study after an injury last year made it difficult to complete my work. As part of my new assignment, I've been instructed to create four assets to use as collectables in a simple game of my own design. For my collectables, I made the following four assets: a trash bag, a wheelie bin, a food caddy and a union badge (the games theme is very bin orientated!). Creating the assets went fine, but I went to texture them and for some reason substance is having problems baking them and I have a bad feeling I might have made mistakes with the meshes. They've all been uv mapped and with two versions created (high poly and low poly). I created cages for two of them but the cages seemed to be making problems worse rather then improving them.
When I try to bake the meshes in substance painter I get the following warnings:
"Could not find vertex colours"
"Not enough data in the high poly to use selected baker. Aborting bake."
Could this be due to a lack of cage (for some of them) or is this a more complicated problem? And if thats the case, are the meshes salvageable as I don't have much time to complete this project! (I also have to do blueprinting which is going to take me a long time!)
Calyx
P.S. If it helps, I can provide the files as need be.
Replies
The color from mesh Baker is set to use vertex colour and it isn't present in the high res mesh.
What that means I'm not quite sure. I've never been given the specifics you talk about and if they do I can't remember them. Downsides of having ADHD I suppose. As far as I know, I was trying to bake the textures of the high poly onto the low poly but I think I have the problem solved anyway. Improving my cages helped a lot too.
Also I understand that it must be frustrating seeing posts and messages like this a lot. But it isn't necessary to be quite so short-tempered and rude about it when you could easily have passed my post by rather then commenting on it. You aren't obligated to help me more then anyone else. I hope the information I provided helps but I apologise if not. I'm still an amateur at this and I'm still learning the technical language.
If you don't need an ID map then you can safely ignore this error message
Note: FBX treats the world scene origin (0 0 0) as the pivot for the objects when you export. If you have a script that moves the objects to 0 0 0 and then exports so the objects pivot matches in the FBX file, then you want to make sure that the pivots align perfectly.
2) You only need a color ID mask if you have applied separate materials (plastic, cord, metal ect) in Maya and want to mask by those materials. If you only have one material applied you are safe to turn off color ID in the mesh baking options.
Note: Most of the time if it fails to bake a color ID map, it aborts the whole process, annoying but behaving as expected. To if you don't need it, uncheck it. However color masks are an incredibly fast and efficient way to apply materials so you should check it out at some point, it will save you a lot of time. Personally I use material color instead of vertex because it saves me a step, just be sure to change the base color of your materials to something different.
3) It's important to know that you are baking "working maps" that substance uses when you apply materials and do your texture work. These aren't maps that you output, you do that by exporting (Ctrl-Shift-E).
4) That UV layout is pretty bad, there are a lot of tiny details that won't capture well. You could make much better use of that space and get much better bakes at lower resolutions. Hopefully you are packing more objects onto the same sheet and we just don't see it
2. Okay, I haven't applied any separate materials in Maya (they're all the same) so that should be fine to turn off. I'll have to have a look into colour ID maps and relevant tutorials at another time, I can probably find out how to do it. Anything to improve my work is a good thing, but since its not a major concern I think I'll leave it till this project is over!
3. Ah thank you, thats easier for me to explain!
4. Yes I'm working about changing the UV Layout for the union badge needs a lot of adjusting, which I'll go back an edit. Theres definitely some excess of tris here and there that I could cut down upon as well so I'll see about changing that. I've also found that when I bake it projects a lot better if I separate out the high poly meshes so they project properly, as some were causing projection glitches that made it look a bit bizarre. A handy thing to know for the future!
Thank you for the help!