baking AO from transparent hair cards? FF7 remake technique for AO on hair?
Hi there,
I saw a video on youtube from Outgang who does a break down of Cloud's character model from FF7 remake. And was just wondering if anyone would know a workflow for how they got their AO?
They have it so that the colour is on one UV set while the AO is on another. Just wondering if there was anyway that marmoset could do such baking with a hair cards that already have an alpha map. Or would this only really be possible with actual strands of hair?
Link to the video (25:33 is part with the hair):
Replies
Yes, this should be possible. Toolbag can't bake to a secondary UV channel so you'll have to do some additional work.
What I would do is make two copies of the hair mesh, one with the main UVs, and another with the main UVs deleted so the AO uvs are the only UVs.
Add a bake object and use the copy of the mesh with the main uvs as the high poly. Create a material on that mesh that uses the hair alpha for dithered transparency.
Use the mesh with the AO for the low poly, and apply a different material to that mesh.
When you bake AO it should work. You might get intersecting from the different planes, if so, consider splitting groups of planes into multiple bake groups (in both the high and low poly meshes) to avoid intersections.
It's also worth keeping in mind that just because a breakdown of a model shows something, doesn't necessarily mean that this is the way the game actually operates ; and furthermore, it doesn't mean that it is the best/most optimized way of doing things either.
For instance, this AO pass baked to a texture could have been stored as vertex color just as well - and perhaps even with greater accuracy. And it is possible that this crazy big unwrap/bake has just been used as a temporary proxy later transferred to vertex colors, and could have just been left there in the game files. And so on.
Which goes back to the above point by EQ : if a baking tool cannot bake some specific data to a specific channel, it doesn't really matter. Because everything can later be converted to anything you need in max/maya/blender.