Polycount of the high poly in the baking process

Lorenzo444

Hi guys there are any limit of polycount of the high mesh when i am doing the baking process on substance painter?
In my case i have a lot of subtools from zbrush and the amount of total points is very very high.

I am thinking that it's better if i do the baking  process one by one, an object at time. What do you think?

Thank you,

Lorenzo

PolyHertz

Not really, but the more polys it has the longer it'll take. Remember you can always decimate your highpoly before baking.

Lorenzo444

PolyHertz said:

Not really, but the more polys it has the longer it'll take. Remember you can always decimate your highpoly before baking.

You are right and there is also the decimation option . Thank you Polyhertz

gnoop

GPU baker is pretty limited ,by VRAM amount I guess.    CPU one would just do something forever with  300mil mesh  and you never know have it hanged already or not.     Substance Designer one just hangs and disappears  from your screen on super heavy meshes. Not really like too hi res something.    if you have repeating details better keep them as instances.  Both substances respect instances in fbx files.

Xnormal could bake 700mil hi res  as of what I once did.    

musashidan

Another more manual approach is to bake out in chunks, composite the normal maps to a single map and apply the result to the asset in a new Painter session. Then you can bake the other maps from that normal map. Decimating can leave artifacting(which can be helped by running the mesh through your 3D program before baking to unify the surface shading)

kanga

You would only break up your hipoly into separate groups if the bake in substance is going to create artifacts, meaning there are adjacent surfaces in the final model. Or if you cant combine your final model into one object. This is where zBrush shines for hipoly creation as it only converts pixols to polys on export meaning the highpoly can be millions of pixols in zbrush and on export will only need to be referenced by substance for the baking process.

musashidan

kanga said:

You would only break up your hipoly into separate groups if the bake in substance is going to create artifacts, meaning there are adjacent surfaces in the final model. Or if you cant combine your final model into one object. This is where zBrush shines for hipoly creation as it only converts pixols to polys on export meaning the highpoly can be millions of pixols in zbrush and on export will only need to be referenced by substance for the baking process.

You may be confusing explode baking with not being able to bake due to massive polycounts? Zbrush still exports vertices so if the tool is 20 million polys then this is what the baker is loading. The higher the polycount of the high poly mesh the longer it will take Substance to bake. There is a limit to this and if it's too high for your system it may hang the baker.

kanga

musashidan said:

...

You may be confusing explode baking with not being able to bake due to massive polycounts? Zbrush still exports vertices so if the tool is 20 million polys then this is what the baker is loading. The higher the polycount of the high poly mesh the longer it will take Substance to bake. There is a limit to this and if it's too high for your system it may hang the baker.

Ah ok. Not a big fan of explode baking I'd rather use selection sets so no confusion there. I may be wrong but what I like about baking in substance is the high mesh seems only to be used for referencing purposes and doesnt seem to actually load it.

musashidan

By explode baking in Painter I mean 'match by mesh name' which is virtual explode baking.

Yes, Substance references the file, but bake times are very much still affected by the density/polycount of that mesh.

kanga

@musashidan   thumbsup!