Hello, everyone. Almost everybody knows about memory limitation of Blender’s baker – normals baking from sculpted mesh could easily run out of memory. Last few weeks Morten Mikkelsen and me were working under baker which could bake things directly from sculpted mesh. We’ve got some success there and here’s description of new approach.
Usage
Usage of new baker isn’t more difficult as usage Blender’s default baker. You should have unwrapped with images assigned to each face. Such mesh is preparing in exactly the same way as you’ve been doing it before. When you’ll be ready to bake, you should also go to the Bake panel from Render buttons.and when Normals or Displacement is chosen in Bake Method field you’ll see new option named Bake from Multires. That’s exactly that option you need to bake sculpted mesh. When you’ll check this option on, you could bake your model with Bake button.
Bake panel with new options
Baking happens from the highest multiresolution level to the viewport level. This means baked texture should be applied on mesh with exactly the same subdivision level as it was set in Preview level of multires when you was baking texture – only in this case rendered result would be correct.
Displacement map baked against high resolution mesh
Baking normal maps
When you’re baking normal maps, baker uses tangent space for normals. it’s the most re-usable space and baker is optimized to use this space, so there’s no way to choose another space for normals.
Such options as Selected to Active and Split aren’t supported for new kind of baker.
Baking displacement maps
Baking displacement maps happens in normalized heights, so black color in image would mean the lowest point in your mesh and white color would mean the highest one.
Selected to Active and Split options aren’t available as in case of Normals baking, but there’s new option available: Low Resolution Mesh. This option is used to specify against which kind of low-resolution mesh heights should be computed. It could be mesh with exactly the same shape as mesh in viewport and could be “smoothed” mesh.
Smooth heights is good for bump mapping and for displacement mapping on a subdivision mesh and non-smooth heights is good for displacement mapping the non-subdivided low resolution mesh.
Limitations
Displacement map baked against low resolution mesh
As it was already mentioned, there are some limitations of new baker:
- Selected to active and Split options are not available for this baker
- Baking could be done from mesh with multiresolution modifier on the top of the modifiers stack. If there’s no multiresolution modifier in the top of stack or subdivision level is set to 0, baking wouldn’t happen.
- Baker can’t deal with displacement and normals textures added to object. Baked texture wouldn’t be affected with this textures.
- Triangular faces could be handled a bit wrong. This happens due to quite difficult conversions between different spaces and solving this issue is still in progress,
-Sergey-
Hi, have any one a good tutorial foe normal map baking .
blender 2.72 will bake my normal or Ao to only one picture .
blender call this picture in the UV editor “cube color” but thats it.
a new created picture is ignored when it comes to bakeing.
And second
blender say in tehe first case :_unwrapped object is needed
-jeah but the object is unwrapped
and in the second case error message appear_ requires multiresolution object
-but the multiresultion modifier is still there and activ from sculping but blender cant found or seee him.
I dont now why
Arghhh crap battle blender Uv mapping Ao specular normal map baking or creating is crap battle.
How to make armour ? any tutorial?
“Baking happens from the highest multiresolution level to the viewport level.”- I think the “render level” would make more sense in this case. Baking is kinda like rendering too and viewing resolution would mean just that, “viewing resolution” and nothing more. I just think it’s more clear this way like being directly in control of the detail and not doing first that to make that other thing happen and avoid that “why is the resolution higher in sculpt mode”-question that could happen with new users.
Other than that, I’m looking forward for this. :) Sounds worthy upgrade. Keep it up.
This is awesome, big thanks!
Hi! Thank you for your hard work. I’m a game developer, and I “Selected to Active” is a vital feature. Will that feature be in your baker in future?
I understand that your baker uses another approach.
Thanks!
Thank you, Sergey! It’s very useful feature in everyday practice.
big feature! thankyou :)
So much needed and useful!
Thanks a lot Sergey!!
! what a great addition to Blender. Saves much time, and many steps, during the process. Brings Blender up to par with many of the apps with similar functionality(and ahead of many of them). Great work Sergey!!!!!!
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