Proxy-based baking in Blender

[critch]

i have had limited success so far but what I’ve seen/done looks good - thanks. I was wondering if using exr format in the object bake would improve results. I saw this postwhich seems to be a similar workflow to what’s going on here.

[FXR]

I ask again, is this intended for all type mesh detail, like skin texture for faces? Or for hard surface stuff

[Piotr_Adamowicz]

It isn’t ‘intended’ for anything. It’s not something that someone programmed on purpose, but rather a technique that emerged from the various properties that meshes and different kinds of normal maps have. That being said, I’d imagine it’d be most useful for hard surfaces, the normals on organic models tend to be better behaved and so rarely need this.

[eye208]

@critch

I was wondering if using exr format in the object bake would improve results.

It’s always a good idea to bake 32bit images if the results are going to be reprocessed before final use. The conversion to tangent space will be slightly more accurate if the input object space map is 32bit. It may even be useful to bake the tangent space map 32bit if you plan to scale it down afterwards. Conversion to 8bit should always be the very last step in the pipeline.

[uvwxyz]

@metalliandy

You really don’t want to encourage a situation where you are using different geometry for you cage than your low poly mesh simply because it’s not feasible in a production environment to build 2 meshes.

Surely it would go something like this:

• Duplicate lowpoly
• Select a sharp edge and press shift+G and choose sharpness to select all sharp edges
• Set the edge bevel weight of selected edges to 1
• Add a bevel modifier (using the weights) with 2 segments and a profile of 1

That process takes about 15 seconds or so.

Thanks eye208 for sharing this ‘proxy’ method, I’ve done some tests and it works well so far.

[metalliandy]

@uvwxyz

Surely it would go something like this:

• Duplicate lowpoly
• Select a sharp edge and press shift+G and choose sharpness to select all sharp edges
• Set the edge bevel weight of selected edges to 1
• Add a bevel modifier (using the weights) with 2 segments and a profile of 1

That process takes about 15 seconds or so.

Thanks eye208 for sharing this ‘proxy’ method, I’ve done some tests and it works well so far.

Thats fine until you have a mesh with 40-70k tris
If you have any errors in the bake you then need to go over the mesh to find the issues and fix them. Perhaps even having to make a new cage and rebaking again and again.
Also some mesh editing currently destroys UV’s, including bevel I’m afraid.
In my experience it’s best to keep it as simple as possible to reduce the things that can go wrong and making an entirely new mesh for this function isn’t feasible.

Anyway, now that OP is not describing this as a cage the workflow is acceptable and useful. The issue I had was doing this for a cage, not making essentially what is a new LP mesh for baking.

[eye208]

Minor update: Proxy-based baking has recently been reinvented again and featured in PolyCount.com’s news section:

http://www.polycount.com/2014/11/26/skewmesh-tutorial/