Baking with a Cage and multiple materials breaks all material bakes but one.
polycounter lvl 6
I have set up a model to mimic a hand wearing a bracelet. The hand is one contiguous closed mesh. The Bracelet is one contiguous closed mesh, which intersects the hand slightly. The fingers are tight together and have high poly data which exists outside of the low poly volume. To capture this data without intersecting bake rays, I need a cage file. The hand and bracelet each have their own material, and their UVs both occupy the 0:1 UV space. All meshes are named with matching names, suffixes, and case.
When I bake without a cage, the bake fails to capture the high poly details which exist outside the volume of the low poly.
When I bake with a cage, the first material in the material array bakes fine. But each material after that will inherit the bake data of all materials above it in the array. This happens in Substance Painter and Toolbag 4 when using a custom cage. I have gone through the process of elimination by flipping all the variables for baking I can think of.
I feel like I've been teleported to an alternate universe where this breaks, because I swear this used to work. I have tried 3 different Substance Painter builds. What "should" happen is that each Material (Hand, Brace) get their own set of bakes, with their AO bakes detecting each bake group and applying shadow across each material.
I have put a zip folder in this google drive link for anyone who wishes to pull the FBX files and try for themselves.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PZ-JmQdDTP8TJ8YygqmhTYjZqa-VGP7O/view?usp=sharing
"Why don't you use UDIMs?"
That is beyond the point. These materials should not inherit the bake data of those baked before them.
When I bake without a cage, the bake fails to capture the high poly details which exist outside the volume of the low poly.
When I bake with a cage, the first material in the material array bakes fine. But each material after that will inherit the bake data of all materials above it in the array. This happens in Substance Painter and Toolbag 4 when using a custom cage. I have gone through the process of elimination by flipping all the variables for baking I can think of.
I feel like I've been teleported to an alternate universe where this breaks, because I swear this used to work. I have tried 3 different Substance Painter builds. What "should" happen is that each Material (Hand, Brace) get their own set of bakes, with their AO bakes detecting each bake group and applying shadow across each material.
I have put a zip folder in this google drive link for anyone who wishes to pull the FBX files and try for themselves.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PZ-JmQdDTP8TJ8YygqmhTYjZqa-VGP7O/view?usp=sharing
"Why don't you use UDIMs?"
That is beyond the point. These materials should not inherit the bake data of those baked before them.
Low Poly
High Poly
Cage
Without Cage
With Cage, Both Materials
Replies
i just played with the distance settings a bit, as I tend to avoid setting up cages for painter - im not sure whats going on there..
Doubling the low poly mesh count where? In folders or the scene?
I almost always bake in Toolbag these days for the skew and offset painting. Offset painting is effectively a dynamic cage used to fix intersecting self-baking
Exploded bakes don't give us accurate AO though...
My students only have access to baking in Substance Painter, so this seemingly illogical bake inheritance is something I'd really like to solve for them. I haven't been able to find anyone else online talking about this phenomenon.