Re-baking textures to new uv pack/atlas?

gnoop

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?        

poopipe

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

Eric Chadwick

Did a test with DGG Rapid Compact lately, it's giving Simplygon and InstaLOD a run for their moneys.

rollin

Lol "Darmstadt Graphics Group" ? 
Thx for the tip!

gnoop

Thanks you very much  guys for suggestions.  

poopipe said:

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?

Eric Chadwick

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.

gnoop

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.

poopipe

gnoop said:

Thanks you very much  guys for suggestions.  

poopipe said:

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 

gnoop

poopipe said:

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?

poopipe

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