From the course: Substance Painter: Photorealistic Techniques

Baking mesh maps - Substance Painter Tutorial

From the course: Substance Painter: Photorealistic Techniques

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Baking mesh maps

- [Instructor] When it comes to creating photo realistic materials and textures, nothing is going to give us as big a jump in realism as baking mesh specific maps. These maps essentially helping us create effects such as dirt gathering in the nooks and crannies of an object, leaks and runs that dripped down the faces of the geometry, or maybe even damage and wear, that affects only the protruding portions of the model. All of which can help tell the story or life of the objects that we are viewing even if those effects are only very, very subtle. So, how do we go about creating these mesh specific maps? With our map baking project open then, we have our mesh object loaded and ready to show us how baked maps can really help out in our quest for either photo realistic or photo based materials. To do this, let's come to the smart materials section of the shelf, look for the steel painted, scraped, dirty material, and then click and drag to place it underneath our already existing folder. Well, that didn't seem to go too well. Seeing as things that are looking neither pretty nor even realistic, which is because, if we open up it's folder structure, this particular material, is made up of lots of layers where quite a number of them use both masks and generators, that actually require information from the baked mesh maps, in order to work properly. Then so, this helps them add realism to the texture. To see these maps or lack there of should I say, let's come to the texture set settings list, in our UI, then scroll down a little bit where we can confirm, that this mesh currently has no baked maps at all. This in turn meaning that the layers, well, they have no curvature information which is used to detect the protruding edges of the mesh, and so add ware. They have no ambient occlusion data, that would really help the program look for creases and more obscure parts of the mesh, where dirt and grime would collect. And, we have no positional data to help the program know which way the mesh is oriented. Meaning, it can add effect such as drips and so on, in which are of course determined by positional data. To fix this then, as I'm sure you would agree that all of these things will add to the photo realistic nature of our materials, let's click the nice big bake mesh maps button in order to open up, its dialogue box here. Here, we first of all need to determine the resolution of the maps to be baked. And so, decide how much visual fidelity we want our materials to have. In this case, as this is a product shot that needs to really show off the power of these maps, I will opt to use a resolution of 2K. It should be noted however, that we can always come back and either increase or even decrease this resolution and rebake the maps at any point, in the workflow. It should be once I need to. And don't worry, we will have all of our textures update automatically. Something else that we could do, is load in a high definition or high polycount mesh, that we would use to bake our maps from. This again, could boost the look and feel of our asset, by potentially increasing the believability of the effects that we use them for. To go ahead and do that, we would click the high definition meshes browse button and then locate the mesh that we wanted to work with. Now, for simplicity sake, I don't typically use high definition meshes in my training courses, simply to keep the file size of the exercise files download as small as possible but, I would highly recommend doing so if you're able to as this can go a long way toward adding realism to your textures. In our case though, we are just going to tell substance painter, to use thin low poly mesh, in order to bake the information for these map types. In our ID section, we can set which IDs we want to render into a baked map. Now, these usually are set up inside our DCC application. As I know we will be using Vertex color IDs later on in the course, and we will show how these are set up inside blender, I will set the source drop down here, to use vertex colors. Now, as we make changes, you will have noted that each of these mesh maps, do have a number of options associated with them. So, the ambient occlusion map, for example, might benefit from a few extra rays, to sample the mesh. A setting of 128, might work well for a project such as this, where we will be getting up close to our asset. Of course, a small background object, could get away with a lot less detailed, say 16 of 32 would work well in that case. The curvature map, could also make use of more samples our secondary rays, as the edges of our objects, really add to the silhouette, and so our focal point of our eyes, when looking at any particular asset, in either a game or a visualization. And so, let's input a value of 64 here. In fact, when it comes to curvature, as we may be baking maps here for multiple objects, to help with realism, we might want to have only meshes that share a name, generate curvature information. Now, we'll do this, where there is also any self intersection. In what situations would this benefit us? Well, let's say either a model we have received or maybe one that we've had to create in a rush, is a little less quality than we would perhaps like. And so, there may be areas where we have simply inserted geometry into another piece of geometry. Now, this would mean that, well, there would just be, a hash transition between the mesh types. Well, substance painter, can read this intersection and create a curvature map for it. This means, that we can still add edgware and damage to these portions of a mesh as well. A really powerful option, if we are working with somewhat substandard assets. Finally, in order to ultimately see the power of these maps, and understand why using them can really add to the realism of our textures and materials, without making any other changes, let's click the baked selected maps bottom. After which, we will see, paint and go through and render out our maps. And right away, we can see that all of the masks, that are used inside of our smart material, now have information that they can put to good use. The curvature, allows us smart materials to figure out where the protruding areas of the mesh are, and so intuitively add edgware. The ambient occlusion is now able to be used and undirt and make it so that, well, it stops the curvature from putting edgware, on every part of the mesh. We will see how we can create these types of effects for ourselves later on, but what we've done here, is hopefully demonstrate why using baked mesh maps is a must when, wanting to create anything like a photographic texture set.

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