[WIP] VAB - Old Hard Surface High Poly Vehicle Baking Experimentation

nikononoki

Hello all !

This is an old project modeled for 3d-print i decided to transform in game asset.

Remodeling a low poly version of the vehicle, baking it, texturing it & assembling in UE.. this is the goal.

I'm facing some questions as i work on the project..

1- I want the model to have "precise" textel density so maybe i'm going to work with udim to get clean details // or i'm going in the wrong direction (? so should i use mid-poly workflow ? tilable textures, masks & decals ?)

2- As I'm experimenting baking normals with Substance Painter & since today xNormal, i'm not sure if the baking is ok or not.. i'm searching info about how to read the Normal Map result to check possible issues. I'm guessin Normal Maps are not magic & at a certain low distance artifacts are normals (or not ?)

For example, this cylinder shape seems ok for u in normal map mode ? (the near bolt is around 2 cm for scale)

3- for Normal Baking .. xNormal or Substance Painter (or Marmoset ?) question is already posted thousand times & i'll check it

Meanwhile i'm transfering some baked meshes in UE forwarding to get it animable...

All kind of feedback is welcome ! i'll try to post the evolution of the project.

Have a nice day / evening !

Niko

teodar23

For small details its ok if they are not perfect. The texture is probably going to hide most of the issues.
I recommend marmoset or substance for the bakes but see what suits you best.
I can also recommend going for a mixed approach where you do a midpoly flow for large parts and for small but very detailed parts do some baking. That way you get very high density texel ratio. You can also bake some object space textures like AO and curvature to use on the midpoly. If your goal is to get this in a realtime engine chances are that you will be able to use those object space textures as blending masks in the materials

nikononoki

Hello ! Thank you for the precisions Teodar,

as i continue i have some baking issue with thin & long parts next to others. i put some support edges for the baking but is there another way to fix this ?

CybranM

exploding the mesh or doing separate bake groups should solve the edge "bleed"

nikononoki

by exploding the mesh, you mean detaching groups of polys inside the low poly or making several low polys ?

nikononoki

Here are some new parts assemble

nikononoki

Hello polycounters ! I'm back here with my project remodeled & unwrapped.

here is a little render to illustrate my post

I'm using udims and facing new questions about wich workflow is best to use in Painter ...

I want to generate differents type of shaders some with opacity, some with emissive, all this in high res, enough to have close shots

i have 2-3 solutions in mind :

1- making one material for the whole model, enabling emmissive, opacity and working with masks. but i guess it's not performance friendly

or

2- making different mats but loosing the ability to hand-paint over the model

a third solution should be a mix : keeping multiple materials where i import rendered hand painted textures done in paralel project where i work on only one mat. but its not so friendly also if modifications are needed...

--edit-- i want also to separate moving & non-moving parts in texturing to avoid unwanted ambient occulsion--

what are u thinking about ?

Thx !

nikononoki

here is the fun of today, i use for the moment one material for both movable and non-movable parts. + one for the tyres and one for emmisive & transparent parts.