Baking textures - force some uv faces to be lower quality

Support Materials and Textures
1

Hi,
I’m baking down materials with image textures and multiple uvs (joined into the same object) to a smart uv uwrapped head model. That works but I also want to; lower the quality of the hair to make more space for the rest of the head in the baked material. I can select the uv faces by material to isolate them for the hair.
What is the next step (e.g. scaling down those uv faces before baking)?
Thanks

2

Unless the smart UV unwrap has separated the hair into its own islands in the UV editor, this will be difficult, because you’ll end up scaling parts of islands and having to move things around in a very fiddly way. However, if the hair is on its own islands, you’re correct; you scale down the textures needing less baking resolution and scale up things needing more.

Hope that makes sense

3

Thanks,
I can definitely select the hair by material and uv it but am not sure how I would be able to combine this with the rest of the model. It would be good to do a 2 stage uv process. I see that the paid ‘Simple bake’ addon let you combine uvs and stop them from overlapping. So, if I can’t solve it with the standard Blender functionality, I will try that.

4

Ah, maybe I’ve misunderstood. Are they separate meshes? You can select them both in edit mode while in the UV editor to have multiple meshes on the same UV map, or you can join the meshes with CTRL-J.

I have only played with it a bit, but this recently released baking addon is free (i.e. pay as little as you want) on Gumroad and I’ve had good luck with the author’s other tutorials:

edit: it strikes me that they may be on a single mesh and you want separate UVs and separate image textures. This is possible by adding UV map in the Object Data Properties and selected the corresponding UV for render when you went to bake the each texture.

5

Thanks for the link. I already joined the separate objects using ctrl-j. I’m trying for single uv and texture solution to export a nice head model I created for use in sketchfab. I found that it doesn’t like a lot of uvs.

6

I think I’ve misunderstood what you mean by “combine with the model”, or I’ve misunderstood something, because I don’t understand exactly what you can’t do.