I have been working with Sparky and Nazg-gul on their amazing sculpt baking patch. This patch allows users to bake high res sculpt data normal maps without going through the normal renderer, thus allowing you to bake much higher poly sculpt data. For example, on my 3gig system I have increased my maximum sculpt baking capability from 1.5 million polys to above 9.5 million polys. An incredible difference.
Anyway - we are requesting additional testing on this feature, and builds from graphicall builders for testing.
Make your basemesh and UV unwrap it/make an active texture to bake to.
Sculpt your basemesh as high as you can (using the multires modifier)
Under the Bake tab, select sculpt bake and select the multires level you want to bake to.
Click Bake
Put the multires modifier to the level that you baked to and apply the normal map to the object. (or you can just delete the multires modifier if you want to apply directly to basemesh)
Smile that you just baked a really hipoly mesh without headache.
Please post builds/comments/discussion/bugs/normalmap bake images in this thread
The sculpt mode is quite efficient, more efficent and takes much less memory than the current baker/renderer. Basically, the sculpt mode may allow you to sculpt up to 10 million polys, but you will not be able to bake normal maps on that 10 million polys. You will only be able to bake to a fraction of that. This patch should allow you to bake to whatever poly amount sculpt mode can handle for you.
Waiting for a mac build. It seems you made a great work LiquidApe and other friends.
Now. waiting for cycles to support nor-maps.
Displacement maps? No reason as multi res means exactly this. Just waiting for cycles to solve a ‘small problem’ here.
All those awesome projects added to Blender recently is making me incredibly happy
Here’s win64 build. It’s first time i’m publishing windows build, but hope it’ll work
Btw, in current implementation normal map is supposed to be applied on subdivided mesh, not to multires with lover render level. It’s question of lo-res geometry used during baker. I wasn’t sure about it and it’s created from base mesh with simply subdviding it – without applying lower level displacement. If you set multires to lower level, it’ll be still some displacement applied on subdivided mesh. It could be hard to see any difference in render result, but let’s be mathematically correct
I’m not sure which way would be more useful. Maybe there shoudl be option to choose if baking should happen against lower level of multires or against subdivided mesh without any displacement.
I’m just the ‘mouth of sauron’. The real credit should go to Morten who did all the heavy math and Sergey who did the heavy Interface coding. I’m just a motivated tester
Here is a test - left model has 1,318,144 faces, right model has 1280 faces. Baked in maybe 5 seconds to level 1 multires with a margin of 6 pixels. I tried 4 but was still getting seams.
Running the 64bit linux version on kubuntu 10.10.64 bit.
This is an extremely helpful feature. I continuously ran into this limit in the past
But I guess the baking isn’t implemented correctly when dealing with multiple textures.
If you have a mesh with more than one textures assigned to parts of the faces - lets say half of a sphere has texture 1 and the other half has texture 2 assigned - All faces gets baked onto the first texture, with the other texture remaining blank.
The orginal baking takes all faces/textures correctly into account.
On a usability note: there is no real visual feedback, other than the pressed bake key, that the baking is running. Also I have found no possibility to cancel the bake.
Thanks for explanation, Nazgul .
I did not understand that “bake to level” setting was relative to the mesh with the normal map.
From my POV, optimal behavior is to stay under the higher level of sculpted data and add a “level to bake” setting to only use Bake Panel and don’t think to multires displayed level.
“bake to level” can go to 13 and few people can sculpt at level 13.
I totally agree for an additional check to prevent to set “bake to level” to higher level than the highest sculpted one.
That’s could be true. We haven’t tested it before. Will try to check this soon.
About visual feedback and cancel. It’ll require to move baker to separated thread which would lead to 2x additional memory usage (data used with 3d view couldn’t be shared with baker). That’s what we don’t want to to atm.
