Bake High Poly onto Low Poly than Hand paint textures on the Low Poly
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Is this a thing, or is it not a thing.
I'm currently using Blender for all my needs. I enjoy hand painted textures but figured doing hand painted textures on a high poly didn't make much sense. So basically I'm trying to normal bake the high poly on the low poly (I think?) Then start painting on a new texture the next thing is I guess I combine them. I get the concept but I don't know if this is practical or really how to execute it.
I'm currently using Blender for all my needs. I enjoy hand painted textures but figured doing hand painted textures on a high poly didn't make much sense. So basically I'm trying to normal bake the high poly on the low poly (I think?) Then start painting on a new texture the next thing is I guess I combine them. I get the concept but I don't know if this is practical or really how to execute it.
Replies
Here's a video by Brushboost on Handpainted workflow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4CQ99--XAA
Here's also a resource from Polycount itself on texture baking: http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking
Hope this helps!
"The usual workflow artists go through is creating the highpoly and lowpoly model > baking all of the maps on the highpoly > then transfering those highpoly maps onto the lowpoly model."
Not at all. The information coming from the highpoly geometry/surface is baked directly to the low poly model as texture(s) - there is no need for the intermediate textures you seem to be describing. That's precisely the reason why highpoly models do not need any UVs..
Also, color data can very well be applied to the high and then baked down to the low without any need for UVs on the high, by using vertex painting (known as Polypaint in Zbrush).
@stabbedbyapanda : what you need to do is to look up any tutorial about texture baking. Most will be in the context of fully normalmapped non-handpainted assets ; but for the case of handpainted assets you simply have to look at the process as a way to generate passes to then paint manually on. Basically you need to generate a few textures (normals, AO, curvature, and so on ...) that you can then composite in photoshop in any way you want to serve you as a base for further painting. The Brushboost tutorial linked above is indeed a pretty good primer.
FWIW, here's a more complex example of what you can get out of baking and compositing the passes :
https://i.imgur.com/2KiY4aW.jpg
As you can see there is a lot of useful information in there that can then very easily be manipulated to create all kinds of painterly materials. This is why most (all) games which started off with 100% manually painted assets with no normalmaps shading (WoW, LoL) see their art teams moving to a bake-centric workflow leveraging highpoly models. Because even though these engines may not be displaying normalmaps per say, there is still a huge value in getting these baked passes done before starting any painting.
And then there are games to do display advanced materials, but still require heavily painted textures anyways as an artistic choice (Dota2). Here's their pass compositing breakdown :
https://support.steampowered.com/kb/8700-SJKN-4322/dota-2-character-texture-guide
Basically the time it takes to sculpt a highpoly and bake it down is shorter than the time it would take to paint everything from scratch, and the result is more predictable and consistent.
I hope this makes sense !
Thank you and for the links.
@pior
/sweats Thanks. The Dota 2 thing is really cool especially as a visual example. So I don't even necessarily need a normal map if I plan on doing hand painted textures. Just an AO and light map of the high poly. From what I'm seeing correct?
I'm going to be going over the video links later tonight. Haven't watched them (I sense I'm wrong and will soon find out in one of the videos xD)