Is there any new and cool preferably semi-automatic way to do so ? with normal maps self correcting for rotating factor, combining separate things in one single texture atlas?
simplygon can do it (if you're lucky with your tangent basis) - it'll do your layout and atlas multiple assets to one page for you designer can do the bake - its automatable with batch tools / automation toolkit but you'll have to do your UV layout by hand and it's more work to set up assets with multiple materials
If you can get simplygon to do what you need it's a significantly better option for handling more than a handful of objects. Be aware that the maya integration only supports certain material types - it will work with custom hlsl shaders though. Also the documentation is shit
simplygon can do it (if you're lucky with your tangent basis
Does it means it has troubles with mirrored geometry? I have lots of such. Can it combine properly "position from mesh" I have baked separately for each of the things? I want to feed this combined objects back to Substance Painter. Or could be reached somehow by mixing with world space normal bake?
Simplygon basically uses FBX for file transfer (at least from 3ds Max, though it can load standalone files too). So if your models break in FBX then they'll likely break in Simplygon.
Thanks Eric for making it clear. That combining does look pretty basic there. I just want to combine maps for Substance Painter/Designer to repaint few instanced fence posts made unique and similar details without baking each one from each own hires and seems only full scale 3d package is capable for that.
simplygon can do it (if you're lucky with your tangent basis
Does it means it has troubles with mirrored geometry? I have lots of such. Can it combine properly "position from mesh" I have baked separately for each of the things? I want to feed this combined objects back to Substance Painter. Or could be reached somehow by mixing with world space normal bake?
The problems I had were with it not using the correct tangent basis when it recalculated normal directions on rotated UV shells.
I don't know whether it was simplygons fault or if the data was shit since I didn't make any of it myself (it's 50/50 tbh)
I was in a hurry and had several hundred assets to pack so I simply told it to not rotate UV shells - it wasted a bit of texture space but since the object of the exercise was to reduce material count at all costs it worked out OK. I imagine if I had some time with it I could have figured out the root cause.
Overall though, I thought simplygon did a really good job with the repack and rebake. The shit bits were all to do with the maya integration and translating our custom materials to something simplygon could consume
The problems I had were with it not using the correct tangent basis when it recalculated normal directions on rotated UV shells.
Thanks for the info poopipe . Looks like Blender copes with that just fine at least. And I solved my older issue with it . While combining parts to a single UV page Blender renders them consequently and thus overpaints parts by the padding . With it set to just 2pix it's getting perfectly ok rotating normal maps correctly . With final padding done by Distance node in SD.
Still have no idea how to do so for AO and "position" properly without actual hires of each detail.
It's probably impossible at all. I have broke my mind trying to mess with that in SDesigner mixing it with directional gradients
BTW, I wonder why Simplygon is so popular ? I see not much of a difference with Blender decimation modifier. it makes same mess with weighted normals, and I have to collapse edges manually in specific order anyway for hard surface things. Am I missing something?
Simplygon is popular because it offers a full suite of tools, app integrations and an sdk. You can even hook it in to your engine and have it work at runtime if you want.
It's really the only enterprise level lodding solution. As a home gamer it doesn't really offer much but when you start to deal with things en masse it's really not got any competition
Replies
designer can do the bake - its automatable with batch tools / automation toolkit but you'll have to do your UV layout by hand and it's more work to set up assets with multiple materials
If you can get simplygon to do what you need it's a significantly better option for handling more than a handful of objects. Be aware that the maya integration only supports certain material types - it will work with custom hlsl shaders though. Also the documentation is shit
Thx for the tip!
Does it means it has troubles with mirrored geometry? I have lots of such. Can it combine properly "position from mesh" I have baked separately for each of the things? I want to feed this combined objects back to Substance Painter. Or could be reached somehow by mixing with world space normal bake?
I don't know whether it was simplygons fault or if the data was shit since I didn't make any of it myself (it's 50/50 tbh)
I was in a hurry and had several hundred assets to pack so I simply told it to not rotate UV shells - it wasted a bit of texture space but since the object of the exercise was to reduce material count at all costs it worked out OK.
I imagine if I had some time with it I could have figured out the root cause.
Overall though, I thought simplygon did a really good job with the repack and rebake. The shit bits were all to do with the maya integration and translating our custom materials to something simplygon could consume
It's really the only enterprise level lodding solution. As a home gamer it doesn't really offer much but when you start to deal with things en masse it's really not got any competition