I’m trying to bake the skin texture I created for my characters’ head with an 8k texture generated from a procedural skin texture. It comes out looking pretty decent in some areas, but in other areas like the nose and the other parts of my characters’ face, it looks blurry (I think it’s because the faces are smaller in those areas?) I don’t want to go higher than 8k (Planning on using mipmapping and some type of dynamic tesselation at that stage). How can I make the final 8k texture look good in all areas? What else could I do to improve the final quality bake without increasing the resolution?
Here are my normal map bake settings:
Samples 1 (I heard that samples don’t matter with normal maps?)
Ray Distance 0.0003-0.0008
I tried UV unwrapping it in different ways and I made sure to use as much space in the UV map as possible.
Since I’m a newbie to all this, I’m not sure if improving the final quality of the bake involves subjects that have nothing to do with this post. How do games like “Uncharted 4” and “The Last of Us” get their faces to get that high of a quality? I’m almost positive they’re not using 16k textures.
If anyone has anything for me to research in regards to this, that would be greatly appreciated.
the reason why your texture have difrrent scale in some areas is because your UV is not evenly unwrapped. In some areas like the nose the UV too squished then on the cheeks. I recomend looking up some tutorials on how to properly unwrap a human head
Replace texture with a UV checker map image. The checker should be relatively constant in size. Alternatively you can make checker smaller in areas where you want increased detail if you’re baking out some procedural stuff or painting textures on it.
Just for reference, uncharted 4 uses 2k maps for faces with few diffrent tiling textures in different areas of the face. I don’t think I’ve seen any current gen game go over 2k for a head texture, it’s almost always 2k map quite often a tiling texture or a few. Control is just all 2k maps or smaller for all the parts of character with no tiling, Horizon Zero dawn 2k with tiling tex, latest Tomb Raider was probably 512 with more advanced set up of tiling textures (flow maps). That’s the main character form those games, some background npcs are probably lower. Keep in mind also that sometimes not all of the maps to build a material are at full res.
Edit: The point that I was trying to make with all of that text is that you probably have no reason to go over 2k for current gen game characters. You can bake at double the res, but the final resolution probably doesn’t need to be that high.
I’ve baking stuff for a while now but I never knew that, thanks! I’m gonna do some research on UV unwrapping a human head. Good to know about the 2k textures for uncharted 4. Will do more research and learn more about that so I can get the textures as small as possible while maintaining the quality
I have to say I wouldn’t focus on adding tiling textures at this stage or at max just a 1 basic general layer. Having a good base is way more important that tiling textures.
