Baking a texture to vertex colors

[melissaVMLZK]

Hi all!  I would like to bake three texture maps to the RBG channels of the vertices on a mesh.  I baked the AO, thickness and curvature maps in Substance Painter, and now want to transfer those masks to the vertices of my mesh for material blending in Unreal. There doesn't seem to be a way to input textures in the Transfer Maps tool, and I didn't see any way to do this with the Paint Vertex Color tool either.  Hopefully that made sense, and hopefully someone knows how to do this 🙂  

[melissaVMLZK]

Is there just no way to do this in Maya?  I feel like I used to be able to do this many years ago but Maya's changed a lot since then. Apparently Blender can do this, don't make me switch! 😉  

[damaggio]

Hi Melissa, could you please provide a similar tutorial in Blender and some images of what you are trying to achieve, that would help us immensely. Thank you.

[melissaVMLZK]

Absolutely!  Here's the tutorial for how to do this with the Blender plugin: 
https://blenderartists.org/t/bake-to-vertex-color-transfer-image-data-to-vertex-color/1179779

So for example if I have this tileable trim mesh:

melissaVMLZK_0-1673983367482.png

And I have baked out the AO, Curvature and Thickness maps:

melissaVMLZK_1-1673983596387.png

I would like to then be able to bring those into Maya and bake these maps into the R G and B channels of my mesh like this (one of our artists made a Houdini plugin that can do this, but we're hoping Maya can do this natively!)

melissaVMLZK_3-1673984981081.png

I hope that gives you enough to go on but I'm happy to clarify if need be.  Thanks so much for looking into this!

[damaggio]

Thanks , hopefully someone will help crack this for you.

[mihirsbcc]

Hi there I am not sure how much I can  help, but May be.... Please go to Mesh Display drop down menu and under VERTEX COLORS section you will find the Paint Vertex Color tool.

There are more tools related to Paint Vertex Tools. Hope it helps

[melissaVMLZK]

Hi mihirsbcc, thanks for the suggestion! That was actually the first tool I tried since I'm pretty sure that was how I used to do it many years ago (and I seem to recall a Mental Ray tie in...) but I still didn't see a way to add any input maps to bake out, unfortunately.

[melissaVMLZK]

I would love to hear from someone who knows whether this is something that's possible within Maya... I'm still looking for a solution 😕

[mihirsbcc]

How to Render Vertex Colours in Arnold for Maya
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cm-pqfLDHB4

[melissaVMLZK]

Thanks so much for the suggestion, I haven't come across this tutorial!  And it looks pretty promising... I thiiiiink I can hook up some maps there in the inputs and bake to vertex color.  I'll give it a try this weekend and see what happens 🤞

[DeepDiveStudios · Accepted solution]

Under Modeling (menu set) > Mesh Display > Paint Vertex Color tool, there is an attribute map section where you can import and export maps.

DeepDiveStudios_0-1682492707102.png

[melissaVMLZK]

OMG, I can't believe it!  Thank you so much, that was exactly what I was looking for!  I had given up on this ever working, haha 🙂  Just look at that lovely test mesh, hahah... thanks again:

melissaVMLZK_1-1682632835734.png

[mihirsbcc]

Glad to know that it worked for you.