Baking pipeline with Substance Painter/Marmoset. Opinions needed.

AlexandrL

Hello guys

Im starting to wonder what are most popular/easy pipeline when we baking in Substance Painter with separate meshes for trouble free baking?
Dealing with tons of separate textures for every mesh parts are not fun. As example a model with 16 parts will end up with 64 maps in simple case like: base color, metallness, roughness, normals.
ATM those unility https://www.artstation.com/artwork/DgBDo 
is the only automatic way of combining maps which i know. 

So i wonder how other people make that? Use that unility? Have their own in-house? Combining maps in photoshop? Just dont broke mesher into parts? 

Currently, cause those unility are sometimes create artifacts in the maps, and its anyway not really great to repeat those process every time when you rebake/adding some details in Painter, im starting to think about buy a Marmoset and just use baked maps in Painter. Pricey as hell brought a 300$ software mostly just for baking, but i doesnt know another solution.
It will not solve rebaking problem. i.e. i will still need to manually update exported textures if i rebake normals, but at least in the end Painter will give me ready to use textures which are combined by default. 

Taylor Brown

Is there a particular reason you need so many texture sets for your mesh?

AlexandrL

Taylor Brown said:

Is there a particular reason you need so many texture sets for your mesh?

1. Model as separate objects is trouble-free baking without any reprojection errors.
2. At least in SD 2020 i didnt know any other options to achieve possibility to hide parts of the model rather than have a model separated into pieces. 

"Exploded bake" can solve the problem, cause we now can have 1 texture set, but it involves more work, and for me it will also involve needs to 2nd bake for AO. So with that technique i will end with 2 sets of models, w/wo exploded, and 2 part baking. 

Neox

why don't you just use name matching?

no need to explode not need for 2 texturesets, just set up bakegroups via name matching.

AlexandrL

Neox said:

why don't you just use name matching?

no need to explode not need for 2 texturesets, just set up bakegroups via name matching.

Oh, those part of the question was adressed to substance themselve, not to marmoset. In marmoset im ofcourse use quick load.
So generally my problem was in founding a niceiest and fastest way to achieve:
1. good bakes without artifacts from surroung geo.
2. ability to hide/unhide meshes in texturing process in substance.

Currenty i think i will stick to common practice of using mat ID maps for hide/unhide in substance. 

Neox

but you can name match inside substance for baking so surrounding geometry doesnt matter

the ability to hide and unhide, yeah thats indeed annoying. a workaround is using an opacity shader but it is still not the same

AlexandrL

Neox said:

but you can name match inside substance for baking so surrounding geometry doesnt matter

the ability to hide and unhide, yeah thats indeed annoying. a workaround is using an opacity shader but it is still not the same

I know, but as i mentioned it leads to hungreds of texture sets for every model parts, and merging them by those TSC utility can cause artifacts, probably bacause of dillation (but maybe i just doint something wrong) and anyway its not great to have that tons of files and merge them all the time if you change something.

So anyway, i tried marmoset and behold his baking glory!  So i will stick to Marmoset and ID maps for hiding routine. 

Kanni3d

Neox said:

but you can name match inside substance for baking so surrounding geometry doesnt matter

the ability to hide and unhide, yeah thats indeed annoying. a workaround is using an opacity shader but it is still not the same

Newest painter rectifies this via geometry masking, which is relieving 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGASuIGSUns

poopipe

bake by name matching in painter does not require multiple texture sets. 

motionblur

Name matching definitely doesn't result in tons of textures. I've been using it on many projects over the last years.
Say your low poly has 3 meshes that share one texture set but you want to keep them separate for baking reasons.
In your lowPoly file name them: mesh1_low, mesh2_low and mesh3_low
Then in your high poly you need to merge all the meshes that correspond this: mesh1_high, mesh2_high and mesh3_high

When your low poly meshes now share the same material then everything will still be merged into one texture.

Yes, the downside is that you need your highres meshes to be merged in the same grouping as the lowPoly meshes are. That can be annoying depending on how complex your scene is set up. It's definitely posible to bake inside Substance with merging separate meshes onto one texture, though.

If it works in Marmoset for you, though - go for it. I fell in love with its baker pretty much immediately as well.