Trim sheet question and texturing it

lockey1995

Hey, so I've finally figured out how they are made baking geometry into a plane thanks to polygon academy's video on YouTube.

However the only thing I'm experimenting with and a bit confused by, is do you just bake a high poly mesh as a floater onto a flat plane. Or do you actually lay out the low poly in the uv editor then do a high over the top and bake that. 

Reason I asked this is because when texturing in substance it's easier to assign colour ids onto actual geo. I think I may be missing something but couldn't figure out how I can assign colour ids to a bake as obviously the low poly being a single polygon I can't assign I'd s to it.

I've seen it done both ways but was just a bit confused. 

Cheers  

Sorry if it's a bit jumbled this phone is shite for typing on 

Gustavo_Elliott

You can bake the high poly as floaters down onto the low-poly. Take this trim-sheet below as an example... the details are just floaters sitting over-top the single-poly plane... the color ID's are assigned to the high-poly mesh and baked onto the low poly the same as normals would be... Let me know if you have any more confusion

---just to be clear.. color ID's are assigned to the High poly, not the low.

RacePeaceDay

You dont need to bake low poly, trim sheets is about reusable texture for many meshes, and better texel density, especially for big objects, because they're tiling many times.

Yes bake trim sheet on plane, and then unwrap low poly meshes to that texture.

lockey1995

Thanks guys I'll try again now with baking the colour id's.

lockey1995

Gustavo_Elliott said:

You can bake the high poly as floaters down onto the low-poly. Take this trim-sheet below as an example... the details are just floaters sitting over-top the single-poly plane... the color ID's are assigned to the high-poly mesh and baked onto the low poly the same as normals would be... Let me know if you have any more confusion

---just to be clear.. color ID's are assigned to the High poly, not the low.

Ok I might be right not to sure yet, the id map just seems weird so i knocked up a quick test and I've coloured my high poly pieces and named the materials. The low poly is just a plane also with a plane cage. In substance painter i added the high poly and baked out the colour id's on material colour but it just seems strange to me unless it is correct and it's just me.

In Maya 

In substance with the colour id

Udjani

@lockey1995 The objects with the yellow material indeed look weird, uncheck the ''Apply Diffusion'' when baking to have a better preview. But if i had to guess i would say that you have to tweak the ''Max Frontal Distance''

RacePeaceDay

Add plane to high poly if you also want have extra ID outside of details, it dont have to be connected to floaters.

lockey1995

Ahh ok I'll try that cheers I thought the high was just the floaters and didn't need the plane. I'm also using a cage udanji but it might need tweaking.

musashidan

You can also split the plane from the highpoly into panels or sections and apply different matIDs to it as well for more flexibility.

lockey1995

So this is what i currently have the blue is perfect the others are still a little off I've tweaked the cage and moved it up aswell so I'm not sure if the geo might be clipping the low poly plane underneath. 

musashidan

The bleeding could be due to the 1 bit id bake that SP does. Using pure 255 colours is best. Have you tried ripping the ID map from Maya?

RacePeaceDay

Where did you place cage? You need have lowpoly plane below, highpoly in middle and cage above (copy-paste low poly to use as cage)

I dont think cage distance matter (I put it far away it still worked with default bake distnace settings in SP), but it shouldn't overlap with high poly, and high poly shouldn't overlap with low poly too.

By look of screenshot it seems like cage is overlapping highpoly, that's why some parts are not shown.

lockey1995

I will update when I get home from work later on and show you the full set up 

musashidan

@RacePeaceDay you don't need a cage. Ray distance is fine.

Neox

but the ray distance is clearly not far enough in the last shot. once you ramp that up it should work just fine

musashidan

Neox said:

but the ray distance is clearly not far enough in the last shot. once you ramp that up it should work just fine

I mean ray distance in general is fine, as opposed to a physical cage.

lockey1995

Ok here is the total set up cage and all, now I thought if you had the cage too far away you'd get similar baking errors to having it clipping but i must be wrong. 

So the pink, green,blue and yellow is my high poly and the red is the cage

Neox

this looks corrct yeah. if it doesnt work properly your naming must be off

lockey1995

I've double checked the naming so I'm not sure it's called panel_low,panel_high and panel cage and the matched by mesh name with _low and _high so not sure aha 

musashidan

You only have a single high and low so the names don't matter.

Not sure why you're having such trouble. Forget the cage and naming conventions. Neither matter for this. Just crank your ray distance to 1, change colour source to Material, leave all other settings at default and bake. I just did a quick test:

Painter baked result

Max high poly

lockey1995

musashidan said:

You only have a single high and low so the names don't matter.

Not sure why you're having such trouble. Forget the cage and naming conventions. Neither matter for this. Just crank your ray distance to 1, change colour source to Material, leave all other settings at default and bake. I just did a quick test:

Painter baked result

Max high poly

yay, it worked cheers was confused on what to set the ray distance to cheers 

musashidan

No problem. It's hard sometimes when you get conflicting advice. The best thing when you're not sure of a workflow is to pause your project and set up a very simple test to run through the pipeline. That way you can do a trial and error on all the settings and see WHY they work or don't work, instead of just plugging in settings because somebody on the internet told you to.