Baking Workflow on the wiki

Eric Chadwick · May 2015

I'm working on a page for our wiki about texture baking. The aim is to have a concise easy-to-follow reference for how to bake decent maps. Maybe this is too difficult to distill down, I hope not.

Anyhow, can you please give it a look and see if it can be improved?

http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking#Baking_Workflow

Here's a pic, just because we like pics.

Please feel free to edit the page. No one "owns" the wiki, it's meant to be open knowledge for all to use. So don't worry about stepping on anyone's toes. But I'm also cool with doing your edits if you want. Whatever works!

Joost · May 2015

Awesome, wish I had this a few years ago!

Might want to get rid of this though.

Paint out errors.

Also small technicality

For tangent-space normal mapping, apply hard edges to every UV seam.

From this thread by EQ http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=107196

To avoid artifacts, you must split your uvs where you use hard edges.
You do not however, NEED to use hard edges wherever you split your uvs(as some may suggest)

Eric Chadwick · May 2015

Ooh good point.

What's wrong with painting out errors? I'd like to make the page about baking all kinds of maps, not just normal maps. I put in this text "However any painting must be repeated if the model is re-baked. Also, painting on a normal map can introduce more artifacts."

Joost · May 2015

It depends on the errors I guess. If it's something small in your AO map and it doesn't take long to redo then it's fine. Though still not optimal.

The main issue I have with it is that you have to redo it every time you rebake. And often it's quite easy to just fix the root cause.

And yeah when it comes to normal maps you shouldn't ever paint out errors if it can be avoided.

This video sums up nicely why you shouldn't edit normal maps (starts at 27:40.) And it's quite a comprehensive guide to normal maps. Worth adding to the wiki!

[ame]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OONQzKcWeMY[/ame]

Teessider · May 2015

Hey Eric, I had a quick look through and so far it's looking good! (although the cages pictures need to have there text to be white - i'm guessing they haven't been transferred over to the new wiki system yet?)

I would just mainly suggest more images or moving up the main sections to the baking workflow section if that makes sense? ie when you introduce the cages part in the baking workflow, it should have the cages section.

Baking Workflow on the wiki

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