Bakes workflow with instantiated/duplicated objects

sirHelix

Hi there, I'm making an engine and I'm having a lot of trouble with the bake phase. My idea was that since I have many objects instantiated/duplicated to save space in the UV I decided to just bake with the original piece and delete all the other objects so they don't take up space. Since they have the same normal info. 

But now I've realized that since they are instances and occupy the same space in the UV they will also share color and texture information. And my idea was that I could have more rusty pieces, or darker ones, etc. 

I've looked around for information but nowhere is it especially detailed, and I don't know how to look for this problem either, I don't know if it's some technique that i dont know, or what. It's probably a noob question, but right now I'm blocked.

My workflow or at least the one I had in mind is: 

Bake in substance the engine without instances to get the normal map. 

Open in another substance file the engine with instances (and with the instantiated objects sharing uvs space) import the bake of normal map. 

And texture the whole engine. 

What is the step I am skipping? What is the best way to approach this kind of props with multiple instantiated objects? Is it possible to have also different AO information? 

Summary: How can I share Uv data of the parts (normals) to save space but have different texturing information. 

This is the engine with all the objects


And this is the bake i made with the original objects only




Love u guys 

rollin

If you need extra data you need some space to store it.. So either you give everything it's own UVs, do something with vertex colors, use multiple uv sets and do some mixing in the shader, etc. 

If you end up using a custom workflow you probably need a custom shader too.

sirHelix

rollin said:

If you need extra data you need some space to store it.. So either you give everything it's own UVs, do something with vertex colors, use multiple uv sets and do some mixing in the shader, etc. 

If you end up using a custom workflow you probably need a custom shader too.

Okay, so there is definitely no easy way to approach this problem. I thought about using another uv map only for those objects, but it seems to me a very hard way to approach this problem, because then I will also have problems with texel density. 

How would you do it? You would not complicate and put all the objects in the uv map?

rollin

If it is mandatory to have everything look unique and it should "just work" I would give everything unique UVs

sirHelix

rollin said:

If it is mandatory to have everything look unique and it should "just work" I would give everything unique UVs

Okey, thank you