SOME TIPS ON WORKING WITH BAKES IN GAME 3D

Another post with our tips on how to improve the quality of work on a separate stage of the 3D pipeline. We noticed from your activity that you really like such laconic selections. Well, here's a new one :)

First of all, we want to say that high-quality bakes can bring a very high quality and expensive look even to a relatively low-polygon and simple model. So here it is important to be very careful and follow some recommendations. Here we'll talk about them below.

Before moving on to bakes, make sure you check the UV carefully

A fairly obvious tip at the outset, but no less important. Smooth mapping is crucial for quality bakes, because all the edges of the shells that can be aligned must be aligned and have horizontal/vertical positioning. This will help to avoid a laddering effect on the seams. You should check for intersecting points or major stretching. Believe us, it is very frustrating when, after hours of tweaking the bakes in Photoshop, you notice that mistakes were made at the unwrapping stage.

Learn to bake in different software

Universal software solutions are good. But at the current stage of 3D development, as a rule of thumb, almost everything everywhere works a little differently. For example, Substance Painter/Designer bakes curvature well, while Marmoset bakes everything else. On top of that, of course, there are cases where the software required for bakes is mentioned in the client's specifications.

How to simplify bakes with a mask

Often there are bugs on the shell borders. Because of paddings, maps look like an incomprehensible mess, where it is difficult to visually distinguish where this or that shell is located, where its borders are, and so on. To make it easier to fix them, you can make a mask of shells in Photoshop. Bake a UV Island map without paddings, drop it into Photoshop, select and delete all the colored shells, leaving only the blackness between them, and save the transparent PNG. Now you have a mask that you can put on top of the maps and clearly see the borders of the shells.

How to quickly correct Skew?

Sometimes we need to correct Skew on almost the entire model. Usually two maps are baked in these cases:

With Smooth Cage, getting a good result on corners but a bad result on planes.

Without Smooth Cage, getting a bad result on the corners but a good result on the planes.

The two maps are then combined together in Photoshop via masks, but this can be too time-consuming. To speed this up, we can use the UV Island map. To do this, load our two maps and UV Island into Photoshop and select the blackness.

Expand the selection by some value, invert it, switch to the Smooth Cage layer and create a mask. The mask is automatically created according to the shape of our selection. Blur it a bit and you get a good result both on corners and on planes.

Think about geometry at the HP stage

HP surfaces that point parallel to the Skew will not be visible on the bakes. Therefore, if you are baking nuts, hollows, or similar into the plane, make small bevels. This will make the detail look more voluminous on the bevels.