11: Baking & Texturing

 Baking textures

Generator

Before importing the 3d assets into Substance Painter, i had to ''explode'' them.

This is when you separate each part away from each other. Substance painter or any other software used for baking textures, create a bounding box around the mesh. If they are too close or the bounding box intersect each other, you will project mesh from other objects into each other.

After i separate the multiple parts, i also had to make sure that each part of the low shared the same coordinates as the high poly parts, so the bounding box surrounds both of them and the textures project accordingly. 

Substance Painter

There are a few settings that you have to change in order to get the best baking

You can bake your textures 2 different ways.

By naming convention: You have to name all the low poly assets with _low and all the high poly with _high. This is supposed to give you better results, however i never notice the difference.

You can also bake by keeping the settings as 'match always'. I didnt change the names so i left it with match always. 

All my textures were going to be 2k so i worked and exported them as such and made sure to reduce and/or increase the rays distance and the anti-aliasing.

Baking the wood plank was similar to the generator.

Keeping all the parts together will create projections in unwanted areas, heres an example of it. 

Once i finished baking, i went back to Maya and returned all the parts to their respective position, keeping the colours and names the same. I exported and overwrote the same file and in Substance painter i changed it in the settings. This allowed me to reimport the meshes close together, keeping the same bake, then i started texturing.

Keeping myself organized:

First i changed the environment HDRI to one with a nice studio light, instead of using an environment with a mixture of assets that can reflect the light on the prop that i am working on. I created folders for each colour id and asset, in which i textured individually. I used multiple smart materials that you can find in the software, however i use it as a starting point. Using multiple alphas and generators and looking at references i slowly textured the props.