Some help understanding baking and texturing

[Anonymous]

Hello guys, it is my first post here I think. I've recently joined a few fellows in a quest to develop a small indie game (Viking Themed) and I never had experience with modeling or texturing for games. So my first model was a small house as we were trying to export it into Unity to see how the flow works (and if it works). I found out that I would need to make PBR materials and bake them, and that is ALL new to me. So I read about it for a few days, ran a few tests and got it done, I made all the textures for my house in Substance Designer, exported the textures and used them in 3DS Max only to bake them into a single map/maps.

After all I am asking myself (and now the forums), what is exactly the workflow all about? Which textures or maps are required to be exported and the main question: why did I spend so much time and effort creating substances and procedural maps each one with different height, ambient occlusion and normal maps if in the end I have to bake all of them into ONE? Now how do I maintain the properties I set for wood, and rattan, and metal, if they are now all into one big chunk and messy baked map?

[Anonymous]

Hello guys, it is my first post here I think. I've recently joined a few fellows in a quest to develop a small indie game (Viking Themed) and I never had experience with modeling or texturing for games. So my first model was a small house as we were trying to export it into Unity to see how the flow works (and if it works). I found out that I would need to make PBR materials and bake them, and that is ALL new to me. So I read about it for a few days, ran a few tests and got it done, I made all the textures for my house in Substance Designer, exported the textures and used them in 3DS Max only to bake them into a single map/maps.

After all I am asking myself (and now the forums), what is exactly the workflow all about? Which textures or maps are required to be exported and the main question: why did I spend so much time and effort creating substances and procedural maps each one with different height, ambient occlusion and normal maps if in the end I have to bake all of them into ONE? Now how do I maintain the properties I set for wood, and rattan, and metal, if they are now all into one big chunk and messy baked map?

[madsd]

Its very easy to control gloss and other properties for metal in a single material,utilizing the "matID" attribute.

A model will have multiple Material ID's if you collapse it and bake it. So make sure you retain the material ID's in the bake process.

This way it is easy to generate a reflection map, diffuse, bump and so on with individual settings pr ID while having 1 material, avoid multi material, use the attribute to make your shader lean and simple.

I made a video, going over how to setup the shader correctly.

[madsd]

Its very easy to control gloss and other properties for metal in a single material,utilizing the "matID" attribute.

A model will have multiple Material ID's if you collapse it and bake it. So make sure you retain the material ID's in the bake process.

This way it is easy to generate a reflection map, diffuse, bump and so on with individual settings pr ID while having 1 material, avoid multi material, use the attribute to make your shader lean and simple.

I made a video, going over how to setup the shader correctly.

[Anonymous]

Helo! Thank you for the reply, it was helpful and now I understand how multiple materials/maps can be rendered with its individual properties into one single map. Now I tried this and my textures came out wrong, unaligned and kind of spread out. As I said I'm still learning the process.

[Anonymous]

Helo! Thank you for the reply, it was helpful and now I understand how multiple materials/maps can be rendered with its individual properties into one single map. Now I tried this and my textures came out wrong, unaligned and kind of spread out. As I said I'm still learning the process.