Monday, February 13, 2017

Baking A Pistol

The process of baking is not the hardest thing to do. The most time consuming thing about it is waiting for the actual textures to bake. Once again, I chose the 3Ds Max tutorial as modeling out the well seemed to cover that aspect of Maya pretty well.
the original model, with checkered textures and a simple animation that separates the different pieces

The first step is to color-code the high poly model. All you need to do here is create new materials that are different colors, and apply them to the selected polys/parts.

like this
It's easier to use the soft select the different pieces (like the bolts) when assigning the materials.

After that comes grouping the high and low poly models into their own groups and then selecting the low-poly group, pressing the ATTACH button in the toolbar to the right, and selecting the low-poly options.


Then, with the low poly group selected, you press 0 to open the render option toolbar:


From there you  assign the renderer to the LP_group (scanline) in the render settings and under the Renderer options select Hammersling for global supersampling.

You can add or delete what type of maps you want to make under the output list (diff, normal maps, ambient occlusion, etc).


Under projection mapping you go and select all the high poly objects.



A bounding box will appear. You can edit it under the "projection" modifier of the object. Make sure it is larger than the actual models.

After that you select the image settings you want for the group and then press bake.

And then you wait.

tah-dah!
With ambient occlusion, you create a global lighting object in the scene and repeat the process:

which will give you something like this for the low poly model

For whatever reason, when switching to ambient occlusion, my renderer settings refused to acknowledge that the low poly group existed anymore:


I couldn't find a fix for this, so I had to switch to the tutorial instructor's sample model instead. It worked from there. Aside from that small hiccup, everything went smoothly.


The process for baking in 3Ds Max is very similar to that of Maya, though Max feels a bit faster (though that could be the model in Max being lower-poly than Maya's well), and it's really cool to see the texture being baked onscreen instead of just a simple loading bar.

I feel like I could easily switch between Max and Maya when it comes to baking.

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