Baking high poly to low poly geometry in Blender produces inferior results because it has no antialiasing whatsoever. This can be helped to some extent by baking to higher than final resolution but it makes bake times go very high. The solution is to use Handplane Baker which can do 16x supersampling on large textures very fast and is just so much faster than Blender in general. It can organize objects into projection groups and bake all the maps you need at once. This addon makes the process convenient, letting you configure everything from inside Blender and export with a single click.
Once itâs done, the file explorer should popup at export folder/textures
way 2:
Hit âGO TO HANDPLANEâ
Now Handplane should automatically start and the file explorer should popup, too
Drag the .HPB file (which should be selected in your file browser) into Handplane
In Handplane go to Output menu and hit BAKE
Once itâs done, your textures should be in the export folder/textures
Using Tangent Space Normalmaps baked by Handplane in Blender:
To get a normalmap that Blender can use, choose the Unity 5.3 Preset. If you choose Unreal Engine 4 Preset, you can still use the normalmap in Blender by flipping the green channel of the texture in your material.
I set the addon up so I can easily bake a 4-way material id map by changing a single property (âMaterial IDâ under the high poly object). The picture shows how to decode it. If you need more material ids, set up the material presets in Handplane manually or just bake vertex colors. Though in that case, you need to find a different more precise way to decode the id map.
Extras:
Save presets for different scenarios
Checking for common errors:
â if lowpoly objects have a uvmap
â if lowpoly and cage objects are triangulated
â if âSuppress Triangulation Warningâ is True: if lowpoly and cage objects have ngons
It bakes down geometry, it does not bake lighting in general.
No way. I used that technique back when I used Blender Internal (R.I.P.), but itâs only useful as long as you have a highpoly object with a relatively low vertex count, after that it would be just too sluggish and impossible to texture, so I do not mind not having that feature. Itâs just best to texture the lowpoly object, of course, there could be exceptions.
As far as I know, itâs just a faster method to calculate AO which may or may not work for the current model. I donât want to waste time trying and trying to find the best settings for the specific models so I just use AO or Cavity.
Now the baking process can be started from Blender, just hit âBAKE WITH HANDPLANEâ and the addon does the whole baking process to the end.
This is good because previously one had to wait until the exporting was done, which could take a whole minute or more with very high poly meshes, then the baking had to be initiated manually.
Now Handplane Baker is fully integrated into Blender.
@helluvamesh Iâm excited to start using this addon but ran into a problem. Iâve got my projection group setup and checked my settings but the export button doesnât show up. Iâm using Blender 2.79 and the latest and Handplane and Bridge. The only thing I can think of is that the Handplane Baker Bridge isnât finding the executeable⌠Any ideas?
Post a screenshot of the export section. Itâs supposed to look like this:
Whatâs you OS?
Open the console and look for error messages (Header > Window > Toggle System Console)
Have you set the path to your Handplane install folder in User Preferences > Add-Onns > Handplane Bridge > Handplane Baker Path?
Default path on Windows: C:\Program Files\Handplane3D LLC\Handplane Baker\
Bug: The script quits when there are 2 uvmaps on a cage object. This doesnât seem like expected functionality and was quite difficult to track down. If this is intended there could/should be an error mesage.
Request: It would be a nice to have UI improvement if the groups could be collapsed.
I had one more thing that I wanted to ask you, although it most likely has more to do with Handplane than your script. I am getting faceted output from the baker and I canât figure out how to fix it.
Thanks for reporting the bug, itâs fixed now. Also added support for collapsing active projection groups.
As for the faceting, I take it itâs a heightmap, thatâs just the way how it is, if you bake a displacement map in Blender, you get faceted results too becase itâs calculated per vertex. You need to blur the texture in an image editor. A lot of the times baking an ao or cavity map produce a result that can be used as a heightmap and those textures are not faceted.
Hi helluvanesh
I always use you addon in my dailywork!
GYAZ Handplane Bake Bridge is very usefull , but i can not find your other addons "GYAZ-Export-Tools,GYAZ-Texturer "in your github sometime ago !
where i can get these addons ?Maybe i miss something!
I am lookingforward a update of these addons for blender 2.8
Big thanks your hardwork!
Texturer:
Now, thatâs a different story. Several of my addons override the default menu system and shortcuts to shape the workflow as I see fit. I took those addons down because they devert Blender too much from the default and editing shortcuts is messy, I donât want to mess up anybodyâs keymap.
2.80:
I will update my addons to 2.80 as soon as it reaches a stable release and a fully updated python API.