I’ve started dabbling in Nomad again ever since it got the crucial paid “QuadRemesher” update (best $15 I ever spent) and the Apple App Store got some much-needed low-poly modeling apps, so that my Nomad sculpts can actually be useable for animation without either having to constantly pass meshes between my laptop and my iPad Pro using cloud storage services (man I wish Apple products let me transfer meshes simply by connecting it to a USB port), or investing in some expensive retopology add-on because retopology in base Blender/free add-ons just ain’t it.
Inevitably I have reached a point in my 3D art journey where I’ve clearly hit Blender’s limits as a “Jack-of-All-Trades” software and recognize not ALL paid software on closed-source ecosystems like Apple’s are evil money-suckers.
I am particularly impressed with how straightforward and efficient Nomad’s texture baking tools are compared to Blender’s. You don’t have all these extra steps creating a texture map to then bake to, saving it to your hard drive, and also creating a separate UV map, repeating for EVERY individual object and material in your entire scene, making sure that bake texture and UV Map are selected in all the materials to make the bake work in the first place (or God forbid, to avoid accidentally overwriting any other texture images in your scene), then switch to Cycles, then temporarily adjust the samples because 4096 Samples is OVERKILL for most of the maps (I usually set it to 4 measly samples for the Albedo, Roughness, Metalness and Normal bakes, and maybe increase it to 128 for the AO bake), etc. etc.
Nomad’s baking tools, on the other hand, are refreshingly simple in comparison, kind of similar to ZBrush in the best ways. My workflow is to just bring in a low-poly base mesh, add a MultiRes modifier so that I can sculpt in and paint all the PBR details, automatically create a UV map from the low-poly, then bake the hi-poly details onto the low-poly mesh via textures. Then it’s a simple matter of deleting the MultiRes modifier to drastically reduce the final file size and exporting the scene as a GLTF file to rig and animate in Blender.
Automatic UV Map creation and layout also seems to be a particular strength for Nomad compared to Blender. To be fair, with a carefully-made manual UV unwrap, you can get good results in Cycles, although no matter what it seems like you have to use Blender’s even-more underdeveloped texture painting tools to “Clone Stamp” out the glaring seams that always seem to come out of even the best UV-Mapped models. But if you rely on Blender’s Smart Unwrap algorithm, it seems to make some very inefficient UV layouts and you have to bake the texture to be at least 4K resolution to capture a sufficient amount of detail. Also, you’d need to find a different, dedicated program like 3DCoat anyway to get rid of Smart UV Unwrap’s even uglier seams on 4K textures, since Blender’s texture painting tools seem unusable for anything bigger than 1K.
With Nomad’s automatic UVs, I’ve found it easiest to just bake the textures at 512x512 or 1K (like ZBrush Polypainting, ~500,000 polygons basically translates to 512x512 textures and 1 million polygons translates to 1K textures) and still capture all the detail in the final baked textures. To be fair, Nomad seems to struggle if each object is more than 1 million polygons (similar to Blender’s sculpting performance), so depending on the power of your tablet, you don’t need to bother with baking anything to 2K or especially 4K textures, unless tablet technology improves to the point where sculpting meshes that are 2 million or 4 million polygons apiece is more feasible. Basically, though, it’s impressive how detailed I can get with sculpting in the details and easily transfer them into surprisingly-small, game-engine ready textures. “A good carpenter doesn’t blame their tools,” as the saying goes, but as a hobbyist who only really has the weekends to work on 3D, maybe after work if my day job isn’t too draining that day, Nomad’s recent updates and superior texturing/baking tools really will result in me making more detailed and interesting characters than I have been making. It basically shifts my time away from more technical stuff and troubleshooting and towards simply making my 3D art look as aesthetically-pleasing as possible.
Perhaps the only reason I would still need to bother with Blender’s baking tools is to do combined bakes where I even bake the lighting in a single texture, or other maps like Subsurface Scattering and AO (Nomad seems to just do the standard Diffuse/Roughness/Metalness/Normal maps). For people who haven’t already paid for Nomad Sculpt and most likely its QuadRemesher addon, it’s perhaps cheaper to buy one of the many quality baking add-ons in the Blender Market, though you’ll still have to think about creating separate UV Maps for the bake on each object and making ABSOLUTELY sure your manually-created UV layouts are efficient enough so that only 1K textures are necessary.
Clearly I have a lot to say on the subject. What say you about Blender’s baking tools and how the Blender Foundation could try to improve the UV Mapping/baking tools to at LEAST be on par with impressive mobile apps like Nomad?
Personally I’m extremely excited about how powerful Nomad is and I can’t wait to try it out when I get a tablet