Creative and Technical – Baking

After having an issue with Mudbox opening my model again I have decided to have a look into baking my model and seeing if it can cover any of the defect that I mentioned in my previous post.

Thankfully my Model will work withing Maya so I can continue with this step.

The first thing I need to do is line up the models in the same position so the texture of the high poly lines up over the low poly to create a BaseMesh.

So I have my models lined up with each other, I need to freeze the co-ordinates of both of them and re-export them with the new transforms ready send into into Substance Painter.

After opening substance and going into file>new I was greeted with the window above and I have selected my low poly model to load into the scene as well as a unity 5 template as it is unity that I will be importing the final product into.

After clicking “ok” I am greeted with this interface which shows my model, it’s UV’s and some setting available on the side as well as tools along the bottom.

I need to click onto “Texture set settings” on the side and then I am greeted with this menu

From this point I need to click onto “Bake Mesh Maps” which will then bring up this menu with various options

The settings that I will need to alter to create the final baked mesh are max frontal and rear distance which control how the texture will stretch onto the model if there are any parts that are left uncovered altering these slider values will be able to amend that.

I will also need to check that the mesh suffix matched the ones that I have saved onto the names of my mesh within Maya, in this case My mesh Suffix is set with Capital letters for High and Low so that will need to be changed within these menus as well.

On the options sat the side I also need to go into the “ID” tab and ensure that the color source is set to material color and not the vertex color as it is set to vertex by default.

After those settings have been change and the high poly mesh has been selected it is time to bake the model

After clicking the bake button on the bottom right I was greeted with this progression bar

It will also update the model and UV map as it advances

Weirdly I am getting a line issue across the side of my boat even though this is not part of the mesh and has not appeared in any other software.

I will look into this issue before I continue any further as the final step is to texture the model.