do i have to bake complex curtains made in marvelous?

cturbo

hi I created some curtains in marvelous Designer and retopologized the curtains in maya, now i have to texture, but when I bake the high-poly curtains to the low in Substance Painter, it's awful because of the folds and swags. Can anyone advise on how you use complex curtains inside the engine? Do I need to bake or can i just import the material  texture into maya and uv map the curtains to the material inside the UV layout and import it in without having to import high and low into Substance Painter?

Eric Chadwick

Depends on how the model is to be used. But in general I would retopo with a shrink wrap type geo, and bake all that detail down.

cturbo

I have used transfer attributes to transfer the low onto the high which is what is advised but i cant avoid getting awful baked details. I brought in a tile sheet texture i created in substance desinger imported into maya applied to a plane and then mapped my curtain uvs over it and then brought into unreal and it looks ok. Can you do it this way for games?

Alex_J

the point of nanite is that you just use that higher resolution mesh and don't use normal maps in the game, and this is meant to be overall lighter amount of resources, since the triangles cost less than the normal map

whether or not you'll actually do that is a question that has to take into scope the entire production of the game and cannot be answered by a single person, and definitely won't be answered by the artist modeling props

if you determine that you want to reduce the model's triangles and use a normal map for the details, the only way to improve the bake is to more closely match the low-poly models shape to the high

this means increasing the resolution of the low, or decreasing the number of folds in the high, so that you find a middle ground where you have the appearance of detail but not so much that the game model cannot match the shape close enough for a good bake

gnoop

The issue you are having comes  from ray  missing error  your  baker does .  When low res surface probably folds into itself or  having narrow gaps  and no way to  separate parts telling what specific point ray should see/ stop at and what shouldn't.

Possible solutions:

1. More low res shell  encompassing the thing around   having lesser of those folds.

2.  Don't use ray tracing baking at all.   Try Zbrush style , or multires in Blender where you bake/ interpolate  shape deformation difference  for each  vertex  or UV point.    

 3.  You can also bake world space normals on hires  object  itself as surface baking  , apply the image  as world space  normal map on  low res object if it has same UV   and  re-bake low res  for tangent space target .  Just surface shader bake .    Could be done in Blender easily or in Substance Designer  using  world space texture as  "world space direction" input.    No actual  ray tracing  necessary.     

  Number3  works perfectly for Sub-Div models too.