How to bake textures for low poly?
node
Hi there ladies and gentleman!
I'm new to the 3D in general, but I've made some progress in my free time over the last few years. I've found help here before and I'll try to find it again. My question is small I think and easy to answer, but because it is somehow specific, I can't find the right answer on youtube (or maybe I did not look hard enough). Even then it's good to ask people about your problem specifically, cuz you may get the most accurate answer.
So, we're making a low poly indie game, and from the start I thought we don't even need textures and UV's because our models are something like...let's say like the game Grow Home, but much more cubic. A friend told me we need textures and can't simply use the models with shaders I applied manually in Maya and I was like okay...time to learn UV's and Substance Painter. So I made a simple object and used the new 3D Cut and Sew UV Tool in Maya 2018 and made some UV's and then I learned how to paint them face by face in SP, but now I'm facing this problem - https://imgur.com/2VdIFsf
The artifacts between the edges. I wanna know...what's the right way and settings to...bake those textures / shaders / materials (I'm not sure what it is) so that my cubic low poly models don't look like this in game. I think that bcuz of how our models look, the standard approach may not be perfect.
And on the side note...again, do we really need UV's and textures? Is that really true for a game with graphics like Grow Home? I just need to be 100% sure of what's the right way to do it.
I'm new to the 3D in general, but I've made some progress in my free time over the last few years. I've found help here before and I'll try to find it again. My question is small I think and easy to answer, but because it is somehow specific, I can't find the right answer on youtube (or maybe I did not look hard enough). Even then it's good to ask people about your problem specifically, cuz you may get the most accurate answer.
So, we're making a low poly indie game, and from the start I thought we don't even need textures and UV's because our models are something like...let's say like the game Grow Home, but much more cubic. A friend told me we need textures and can't simply use the models with shaders I applied manually in Maya and I was like okay...time to learn UV's and Substance Painter. So I made a simple object and used the new 3D Cut and Sew UV Tool in Maya 2018 and made some UV's and then I learned how to paint them face by face in SP, but now I'm facing this problem - https://imgur.com/2VdIFsf
The artifacts between the edges. I wanna know...what's the right way and settings to...bake those textures / shaders / materials (I'm not sure what it is) so that my cubic low poly models don't look like this in game. I think that bcuz of how our models look, the standard approach may not be perfect.
And on the side note...again, do we really need UV's and textures? Is that really true for a game with graphics like Grow Home? I just need to be 100% sure of what's the right way to do it.
Replies
IMO, baking texture sheets for each model with the sole intent of applying mere material values seems like excessive amount of work and very unoptimized, considering you'll be storing a whole lot of pixel data which just apply the same RGB values over and over... If you plan on having all lighting done in real-time (no baked lighting at all), you shouldn't need UVs at all. At the cost of splitting up every model into their respective material groups, you should be able to apply different shaders to them individually in-engine.
For character models that will need different materials to areas stuck to the same mesh, I would do shitty UVs on them, where the entire point is to put each separate material in it's on UV set. Ingame shaders should be able to put differing materials to different uv sets without any textures present. This would probably require custom shader coding tho, IDK what engine you'll be using.
IMO, baking texture sheets for each model with the sole intent of applying mere material values seems like excessive amount of work and very unoptimized, but if you want to go down that route, you should read all the stickied threads for help, cause you've got a lot of learning to do.