Hello, I need to bake high to low poly. I have a rather complex model with many thorns. I wasted to much time on this already to just continue. So here are my questions:
I used smart UV project, because I get to much stretching if I make a normal unwrap. Now I have hundreds of little islands and I’d rather have a few instead. Is it possible to make a unwrap with seams without much stretching where the thorns are?
When I try to bake it, I will get artifacts because the thorns are facing each other. I can only bake with a cage and had a lot of problems with it, already spending over ten or 15 hours or so for the whole unwrapping baking process for the model.
The first thing is that it’s really hard to get the cage working. If I inflate it, it will quickly overlap. So I basically have to move every vertex of every thorn by hand. If I realize later that I made a mistake on the low poly I have to reconstruct the changes on the cage, because it has to be the same as the low poly and I can’t just make a new cage.
Is there a better way to bake this without getting any artifacts (I guess using a cage is the only way) that is also faster?
You would have to place the seams so every thorn is split in 2 halves. If you have a whole thorn in the middle of an island, you will get stretching, there is pretty much no way around it.
I don’t know how well it would work for this, but I do know an other way that doesn’t need a cage.
You bake 2 times, using different distances. A first bake with a very low distance to capture the detail in the crevices and a second with higher distance to capture the peaks.
Each bake will have glitches, but in different areas. You can then take the 2 images in Photoshop or an other similar program and stitch the good parts together.
Alternatively, you could consider building the object differently if possible. Does it need to be a single mass like this? What if it was modeled and baked as separate spikes that were then intersected into each other? Would that be acceptable in this case?
I dont think there is any easy and quick options for unwrapping such model.
Its something which better to be modeled with unwrapping in mind, i.e.:
you create all thorns with the same topology/you make 2-3 types of thorns with different topology.
Like so:
Notice how materials representing different kind of thorns, with 2, 3 and 4 segments.
Now its way more easy to select tip of the trorn and simply expand selection. After converting selection to boundary loop we basically get out thorn separated.
When it would be really easy to cut another loops to get less distorted UV.
@etn249
Thank you. This really saved me. The cage was already broken again somehow, so I would have needed to start again.
I made a variety of bakes with different distances and spent quite some time figuring out the perfect distance for the rays and extrusion. It still took some time, but was way faster than with a cage (assuming the cage even works).
And I actually unwrapped all thorns solely.
If I’d do something like that again I would probably make separate meshes for every thorns.
