Can someone explain the mid-poly baking process?
polycounter lvl 5
Hi polycount!
I've been struggling lately with baking something that's somewhat cylindrical. It has to be pretty low poly but I'm baking from a high with nice smooth curves. I keep hearing that this may be a good place to "bake to a mid poly" but I'm not sure I understand what that means. My interpretation was to have a version of the mesh that is somewhere between the high and the low (in this case especially where it comes to having more edges along the cylinder), bake to that, and then remove the extra edges from that mid-poly to create my low poly. As long as I don't remove any UV seams it seems to improve the bake a bit but then I just end up with warping in other details which makes me thing I'm misinterpreting this whole workflow. Any pointers?
Thanks in advance!
I've been struggling lately with baking something that's somewhat cylindrical. It has to be pretty low poly but I'm baking from a high with nice smooth curves. I keep hearing that this may be a good place to "bake to a mid poly" but I'm not sure I understand what that means. My interpretation was to have a version of the mesh that is somewhere between the high and the low (in this case especially where it comes to having more edges along the cylinder), bake to that, and then remove the extra edges from that mid-poly to create my low poly. As long as I don't remove any UV seams it seems to improve the bake a bit but then I just end up with warping in other details which makes me thing I'm misinterpreting this whole workflow. Any pointers?
Thanks in advance!
Replies
You can patch it up to an extent by transferring normals from the original mesh to the edited one but it's all a massive hack and what I would classify as a shit way to do things.
Personally I avoid baking to cylinders where at all possible.
You get better results by baking to planar geometry and mapping that to the cylinder - the mesh normals can do the work of maintaining the cylindrical look at all Lod levels and you don't get the distortion.
A bunch of good stuff there, in particular see Understanding averaged normals and ray projection/Who put waviness in my normal map?