Bake Comparisons

[thomasmahler]

Hey guys,

Since this is probably the neatest game art board out there, I thought I should add this thread here. I've been trying out some bakers over the last couple of years and I'm still not really happy with any of them. There isn't one batch-bake solution that'd bake all the maps I want (normal, AO, Light (GI Pass), diffuse, alpha, displacement, etc.) without giving me any technical headaches or whatever. All I want is a baker which you'd feed with the highPoly assets and the loPoly assets, click on the maps you need and let the app render it out.

Baking all the necessary maps and cleaning them up still takes 1-2 days on average for a production model, which is quite long and can be pretty annoying if your character is built from multiple assets.

As a test, I put up a small comparison about how different the results are that I get from some of the bakers out there. I baked an ambient occlusion map in multiple apps with the same geo sources, here's the result:

http://www.thomasmahler.com/images/aocomparison_00.jpg

So what are you guys using for baking maps? I'd love to get some input on this, since baking is just one of the more annoying processes in CG.

[Mongrelman]

Thanks for the comparisons, very helpful.

For the maya one, did you just bake the AO straight from the high poly to the low? At work we bake the AO from the high into a texture for itself, then bake that across to the low poly as a diffuse. It's given us better results than AO straight from high to low. Although it is a bit annoying with the high poly require UVs. Auto uvs sometimes give artifacts in the AO map (for the high poly), but usually those disappear when baking that map to the low poly.

[thomasmahler]

Yep, that was a straight high to low bake. I know a couple of studios that do exactly what you're doing, baking the AO on the highPoly as texture and baking the AO Map as a colormap from the high to the low, but I think that's more than 'a bit annoying' - it costs too much time to do this, too much time spent with setups and uving a non production mesh, etc. The Topogun bake was also a straight high to low bake and it pretty much always gives me the results I want from my AO Maps.

Only downside is that Topogun uses the GPU for the AO maps and you can pretty easily run out of video memory, meaning that I get all-black maps or crashes if I render a 2k AO from a 2+ mio poly object.

Also, Topogun is not a batch baker and loading in and baking out maps if a character has more than 10 assets or something is also pretty crappy, especially if you're on a tight deadline.

[ThatDon]

I use alot of Crazybump overlays based from my normal map.

If you have the money FaoGen can't be beat!

[seven]

I concur. We use FAOGen at work. It's an awesome program that uses the gpu to process the AO map instead of processor time which turns out a AO with decent results in most cases, less time than a cpu. Worth every penny.

[DeSiGnBrEaKeR]

is it possible to bake the ao map from a high poly model to a low poly model in faogen or do i have to unwrap my highpoly?

[thomasmahler]

That's what I want to know. There's nothing about baking from high to low in the FaoGen Online Manual as far as I see.

[ThatDon]

You gotta bake the AO map into the highpolys vertex colors then use a 3rd party program like max or maya and due a color transfer map.

[DeSiGnBrEaKeR]

ahhh nice, thank you so much!!!

[Uberific]

Just a question but which of those 2 topogun you baked out are the most preferable to you?

[Spaz8]

I've seen pretty nice AO come from XSI's ultimapper.. and Max.

[thomasmahler]

Just a question but which of those 2 topogun you baked out are the most preferable to you?

You mean because the Skylight one does have shading in it and it doesn't seem like it'd come from above? Yo can set-up the coverage value in Topogun, at a very high value, it looks like the skylight would come from above, so that's fine.

For most of my models I do use the Skylight one as a 'lipstick', in order to create the colormaps more easily. Then it depends on what the client needs. But the Skyilght in the AO is definitely helpful.

[Uberific]

Alright thanks. I was thinking it may have been that one, and yeah that was the reason I asked. Seemed like it'd be the most effective but i wasn't too sure. I have been trying to get better at baking these things myself so this is definitely insightful.

[Marcus Dublin]

3ds Max for me, you can see my results here: http://www.gameartisans.org/forums/showthread.php?t=5000&page=3

[-JL-]

You gotta bake the AO map into the highpolys vertex colors then use a 3rd party program like max or maya and due a color transfer map.

Hmm, so how of an accurate results will you get when you have to optimize your highpoly meshes first? Wouldn't that screw it up more or less. :think:

[BoBo_the_seal]

I love Faogen but I have issues with anything over 200,000 polygons. It just bakes pure black. Any hints on how to get around this?

- BoBo

[nazeil]

You gotta bake the AO map into the highpolys vertex colors then use a 3rd party program like max or maya and due a color transfer map.

Can you elaborate on that? Where in faogen does it allow me to xfer out the vertex AO?