I'm a bit lost with the baking process
I'm currently baking pothead's companion and the baked layers are coming out blurry or pixelated. I've tried baking in 4k and have also tried in 8k, but both of those are worse than what I have prior to baking.
The image texture from when I texture painted the model is fine, but the added image textures (all the scratches and other images applied) lose their quality.
I must be missing something. It's the same with the roughness and bump bakes too. The bump is super pixelated, even when selecting 32bit and following the steps Jonathan does when saving the file. I also have an issue where the UV seams are super obvious (and pixelated). I tried messing with the margin value and that doesn't seem to do much.
Any pointers as to where I might be falling off the track?
I'm going to have another go today and see if I can get it to work
The first image is with the 8k baked colour map pugged in, and the second is without any baking done;
Whelp, this is definitely going to act as a reminder for next time!
Is there anything I could do to save it? What comes to mind is moving the uv islands that are disproportionately too small to another UDIM tile and repainting them (carefully). Or is there another solution?
Wow this escalated quickly, this got long fast. Your models is looking incredible Harris, from the images I saw. You know we are all waiting to see the final result, it's amazing how much you've learned in a short time. How close would you say you are to finishing? Are you at 90%? 85%? 97%? You want some pressure and deadlines? Those are great motivators. Ok Harris, the director came by, he said he needed you to give him a delivery date, the production needs the model, the animation and rigging team are waiting for it because those shots need to be rendered pronto. So give me a date.
Right,
I am no specialist, but three solutions that I can think of are:
- not Baking...(apart from the 10000's of experience points you gained, is there really an advantage? It's not a game-ready model anyway...)
- your suggested solution of moving parts to another UDIM Tile..(a lot of work, but best result if Baking is necessary...)
- leaving it as it is now. As Omar said, it is looking amazing already, even with the Baked Textures.
I did realise that I definitely don't need to bake it. I've learnt where I went wrong and how to fix it. And I reckon I've got a pretty good rundown of the fundamentals of baking now.
If I don't bake it prior to rendering, I'd like to bake it later - I've been dared to create a walk cycle for it by a friend (this of course will happen later down the road). Am I correct in that a baked model provides better performance when rendering an animation?
I had a thought in regards to rescaling the UV islands, hear me out. I've identified which islands can do with being larger.
If I've thought this out in my head correctly (I'm currently on the train on the way to work), I might not need to re-texture paint them. I've looked through the materials and the bump is not influenced by the texture painting. I don't need to rebake the colour, metal, or even really the roughness throughout the model. Could I rescale the problematic UV islands and only re-bake them specifically (or the objects as a whole)? I wouldn't need to rebake the entire model either. Again, this could be bonkers, but bare with me.
In regards to how close I am to finishing - there's nothing else I can think of that I need to do with Noodlehead - the materials are all finished. I do want to go back into pothead and recolour him so he better matches NH. I imagine I can just slap on a mix colour node and call it cool. Maybe give him a sticker or two.
I had also envisioned that I'd create an environment to render them in, but I think I'm going to cut my losses on that one and do something like an infinity wall (they'd probably look pretty good on a plain background anyway).
Otherwise that's it. Provided life doesn't get too much in the way I would like to think I'll be done this weekend! (Minus any time given to baking/rendering)
I can finally confirm that I have finished all the modelling, texturing, colouring etc etc across both Pothead and Noodlehead!
I am commiting to calling it finished.
Now all I am allowed to do from now is set up the render and submit it.
Please inform the rigging and animation teams that I'll be home in time for dinner!
Just a quiet update - I have gone back and fixed the issues I was having in this thread. It's been a real head scratcher, but I did it via creating a new uv map and rescaling the offending uv's. There are some miiinor spots where there's pixelation, but it's hardly an issue and I doubt anyone would be able to tell if they haven't been looking at this for as long as I have. And now I have a full texture set of baked images for noodlehead - aside from a few outliers that have special proprties where it's not worth creating an entire baked image just for one or two small details. Cheers!
Another note on the material blackout issues I was having a while back, it could have been that my gpu was running out of memory. I had a baking issue today where things were resulting in black. I looked through the system console and it was saying "system is out of gpu memory". It turned out that I needed to use the cpu to bake them instead. Next time I get a material blackout, I'll try changing to cpu and let you know if it does anything - just so you can forward this info on to any other students!
