Baking out Diffuse maps (for quick selecting in Photoshop)
polycounter lvl 9
Hey there guys!!
So, I have recently been studying hardcore about everything texture creation (especially for environment art)...
I was wondering, especially after watching the Eat3D tutorials "Old Pillar" and "Next-gen Texturing," how exactly he goes about getting that very useful flat color map that he brings into photoshop and uses to make selections with the wand?
I use Maya for my geometry creation needs in general, but I'm really not sure how to bake out just the color map via Maya for use in Photoshop, so that when I get to the texturing phase I can make selections on certain areas of the texture map way easier?
It is so strange, because I can create every other map wonderfully, yet something so simple as just a color map, I still don't know....I am willing to bet it's stupid simple to bake out one of these, but in my search online, I have not been able to find out how!
I know that you must assign different materials with different colors to whatever you want / need to on the geometry itself, it's just the "getting that to the texture map" part that I cannot fully understand.
For further explanation, I plan to use the base colors of this baked out color map in tandem with my AO etc maps...
I hope somebody can just point me in the right direction! Thanks guys
So, I have recently been studying hardcore about everything texture creation (especially for environment art)...
I was wondering, especially after watching the Eat3D tutorials "Old Pillar" and "Next-gen Texturing," how exactly he goes about getting that very useful flat color map that he brings into photoshop and uses to make selections with the wand?
I use Maya for my geometry creation needs in general, but I'm really not sure how to bake out just the color map via Maya for use in Photoshop, so that when I get to the texturing phase I can make selections on certain areas of the texture map way easier?
It is so strange, because I can create every other map wonderfully, yet something so simple as just a color map, I still don't know....I am willing to bet it's stupid simple to bake out one of these, but in my search online, I have not been able to find out how!
I know that you must assign different materials with different colors to whatever you want / need to on the geometry itself, it's just the "getting that to the texture map" part that I cannot fully understand.
For further explanation, I plan to use the base colors of this baked out color map in tandem with my AO etc maps...
I hope somebody can just point me in the right direction! Thanks guys
Replies
To figure out which 3d piece sits where in the texture, and of course AO, lightraced or other dirt alike maps to get more depth into the texture.
I wish that those things would become standards in most 3d packages, baking special purpose maps on the fly directly into the clipboard.
Yes, a blockout map is exactly the concept I was getting at. I'll go and give TexTools a try. I have max 2011 as well as maya 2011 on my machine, so I'm sure I can give it a go.
hear hear!
Here a little question, ive done the uv so far.
Now in Cs i recently noticed that is probably good to have
a selection mask. Ive downloaded a nice plugin that put all my
selected objects into a different color (each into one surface shader
with color)
Id some issues to bake this mask in a texture. - in maya the texture is still black.
In xnormal the texture has only one color.
Can someone help me with this ? How would you bake a selection mask ?
(Maybe without adding tons of Lambert shaders and done the color manually)
- transfer map doesnt work cause of multiple objects and surface-shaders
Okay, my question was how to bake out a
selection map in maya for CSS.
Here is a great plugin
Under Rendering -- lightning and shading you can batchbake mental ray and bake the colors to a map.
0,0,1
0,1,0
1,0,0
1,1,0
0,1,1
0,1,0
1,1,1
Bake a color/diffuse map from transfer maps
Then you can use a PS script to split them, Andy Davies (metalliandy) released a nice set of actions which you can find here.
meshes and dont want to add values per hand - the plugin does it for me, by simple
clicking.
Ill try your method tomorrow morning..
thanks again
xnormal had this feature for a long time now.
all you do is export as separate obj files and xnormal applies random colors to them.
Assign materials with solid colours (1, 0, 0 - 0, 1, 0 etc) to your objects (or specific polygons)
Go to the shader tree and click on Render > Properties tab, and set your frame width to your desired texture size
Go to the render menu and click Bake to Render Outputs. You might get better results by setting your output in the shader tree to Diffuse Coefficient rather than final colour.
check the alpha, channel and make sure it is white, and try useing xnormals sbm format.
i do vertex colour bakes in xn from maya all the time, both for blockouts, and for baking curveature information i calculate in maya that is stored in vertex colour.
Also, sometimes, your model will share the same mesh of different parts of the model (EI: Your helmet has a 3/4 different sub-objects which are defined as different material, people would like to apply different colors to represent said material, people can't do that, especially on a single mesh).
I honestly suggest if you want more refined control to simply used vertex colors to your advantage, especially if you're going after material definition (EI: Red = Wood, Blue = Metal, etc).
if i export all my highpoly separately according to material definition(which i always do anyways), wouldn't applying vertex color to highpoly become redundant ?
also, applying vertex color would mean importing a dense highpoly mesh back to maya/max is a hassle.
the base color u see here was baked in xnormal pretty fast. it is more than enough to create all the separate material base color masks.
With all of these options, there'll always be a little cleanup to do before you can really setup your masks (at least in my experience), but yeah in the long run it's a huge timesaver.
there is nothing to it really. all you have to do is export all your meshes or subtools from zbrush as separate obj files, source them as the highpoly in xnormal and then source your lowpoly which you want to bake onto and use the "bake base texture" feature in xnormal. make sure in the options of that feature you have "write object ID if no texture" checked.
The biggest problem is see with this is sub-object selections. I virtually always have smaller polygonal selections that I want to mask with different materials, splitting your objects into multiple files wouldn't allow this.
If you're dealing mostly with really dense sculpts I could see how making these sort of selections and applying materials would be a pain though, and maybe polypaint or something would be a better option if you need more control.
As to if the time taken it worth it or not...depends on the mesh honestly.
agreed. it all depends on how you plan ahead your highpoly mesh.
in some cases if you have small parts of your highpoly that are not different object initially you can either select those polygons, split them inside zbrush and export that or you can came quick vector masks inside photoshop based on the normal map. both of these work arounds take literally less than 5 minutes.
i dont remember spending more than 15 minutes extracting a complete color mask for all the elements of my mesh ever.
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I can never apply the color as vertex color in Maya, export it (either as OBJ or FBX) to xNormal/Topogun, and get the diffuse map to bake correctly. Maya's OBJ exporter seems to not allow vertex color. The FBX exporter I'm not sure what's going on.
I still have some bleeding sometimes, but nothing crazy.
Now of course dDo can do that but I wonder if there is some kind of standalone script for that out there.
Thanks!
http://eat3d.com/forum/tips-tricks-and-free-videos/rgbcmyw-splitter-photoshop-actions
There is not AA on my exported texture, so no bleeding on this side. The only bleeding I have is from the vertex colors. The script is not available in stand-alone, but you can find it in my froTools.
Here a little example :
Ninja Dojo Home Page
Ninja Dojo (Black Belt) on Creative Crash
Ninja Dojo (Grand Master) on Creative Crash
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That's the way I've always done it.
And with a bit of MEL you can fully automate it.
EDIT: Working in Maya
I'm a little confused on what you are saying....maybe my question was confusing...haha. If I apply a bunch of materials to a high poly object, let's say 6 different shaders of different colors, and want to bake that color map out (for use in ddo), but only have one high poly mesh (no low poly), how would I do that?
If you're working in dDo, I question you only having a HP, since normal maps are a key factor in the magic, and you can't bake normals from a mesh to itself.
obj doesn't support vertex colors, you'd need to use the xNormal .sbm 'porter to handle those.
That's what I was thinking...cool. I plan on using low and high poly for baking normals as that's my normal workflow, but have some high poly models that id like to tinker with in Ddo for diffuse, spec, and bump maps.
And the same problem arises with xNormal: You need to separate your selections, separating/extracting mesh pieces, exploding the mesh, exporting each individual part as OBJ. Why is this so damn hard anyway? It should all be automated!!!
Maybe in XN4, we will get this, but until then, exploding and moploding is the only solution.