Quad mesh only for baking? Wont I lose consistency?

3D4Eva

I'm working on an asset for someone but they want me to bake high to low and they said not to use a triangulated version of the mesh, only quads as this is being animated for a short film.

I do games mostly so I keep everything triangulated because a quad can be split in different ways and it wont be consistent if that mesh gets converted differently in their application with that normal map.

I use Substance Painter a lot and followed this guide:

https://docs.substance3d.com/bake/triangulating-before-baking-159451841.html

I'm confused on how I can bake a normal map and be sure it wont cause an issue without converting to tris first??? Does anyone work outside of games that can help me better understand this?

Ghogiel

Triangulate and export a copy of the mesh out from the app the film is rendered in. Do your texturing. The maps should match the triangulation on the model you didn't collapse to tri.

3D4Eva

Ghogiel said:

Triangulate and export a copy of the mesh out from the app the film is rendered in. Do your texturing. The maps should match the triangulation on the model you didn't collapse to tri.

Thank you so much for your reply.

If the quad looks like that of the first part of the image:


If I convert the quad to a tri I can get either one of the two versions, and my normal will be baked with that, wont it look wrong when applied to the quad version?

oglu

Are you baking a displacement map? Does the object be subdivided for rendering? 

3D4Eva

oglu said:

Are you baking a displacement map? Does the object be subdivided for rendering? 

Yes I will be baking a displacement map, and the mesh is subdivided at render. The normal map is for more fine details on the surface.

I should note, some objects will have just a normal map, and no displacement, a few smaller pieces so that issue in that picture could come up for the normal map.

oglu

A displacement map is baked to the limit surface. Thats the subdivided object. The sculpted and the lowres is subdivided for baking. 

3D4Eva

So I would assume for the low poly there is going to have to be some subdivision to prevent this from happening:

Initial object as quads



When I take it into Painter the quad gets cut down the middle from the top



When I render this out in Maya it will cut it across


Will I need to subdivide this low poly mesh enough to maintain that slope to avoid this from happening? 

Like this

'

This is a simple example and maybe not the best but I need to keep the geometry the same as given for some of these. I'm guessing just subdivide at render would fix this? When I texture I'm stuck looking at the divided quad which looks off from what I will need on many of these objects.

oglu

For displacement you need much more geo in the low and it needs to be viewed in subD preview mode. The renderer is subdividing it during rendertime but you need to preview it.

3D4Eva

Thank you. I guess I will need to create a duplicate low, subdivide it enough and convert to tris just for the texturing part so I at least can see it as it would be outside, and pass on the textures with the unchanged mesh.

This is different than I'm accustomed to as I have not done work outside of game assets.