jameswatt3d
Hi Paul,
I've been trying to bake some rock pieces on to a plane, so I can use them in a particle system. The normals come out nice but I'm not getting any alpha channel generated.
I'm using the ‘Trace Mode’ as Surface Normal and I'm outputting Alpha from the generate property group.

I also tried the simple baker, and although I'm getting the expected results the alpha generated is not anti-aliased.

Any ideas?

James

Hi James,

This is what the Maps Baker generates for Alpha:


Is this not what you expect?

Paul

lebref
Dear friends,

I'm looking for help:
I'm using houdini Apprentice and trying to find a process to generate diffuse/albedo baking.
If the baking part is ok we should be ok for a houdini production

I'm used to work on softimage then i'm a little confused now.

Here is the point:
I make a cube in a empty scene. Adding a Blue Sphere then using a sop maps baker .
- on the cube I put auto UV and normals plus a black color point .
- on the sphere i put a blue constant shader plus a red color point.


my wish is to bake the blue sphere on the cube, with a correct antialiasing as I want to use it as a mask for generate and create others stuff in substance.
or at this point I just get color point channel but it's not antialiased .
when I check diffuse , I only get a pink picture without any informations.

Could you help me on the good process ? Did I missed something?

Kind Regards ,
Fred

Hi!

Pink means that it couldn't find a texture. This tells me you were trying to render the diffuse map instead of vertex color
See image for how I achieved (what I think) you want. I also attached a .hip for your convenience.



Paul

Hi Paul,

Thanks for your answer that's helpful, this is exactly what i'm looking for.

I open your hip file and when I click bake, it's not working on my houdini ( 17.5.173 Apprentice )
Maybe because my GameDev Maps Baker is still in Beta:
I'm on the 1.173 release, should I try the 1.183 version?

Actually I made the same process on a new scene with a cube and a blue sphere.

If I merge the black cube with the blue sphere then connect it to high resolution geometry input,
my color channel is only with the black color.

When I only connect the blue sphere to the high res input, I got my blue sphere on the color bake channel but it's not correct as you can see on the screenshot.

What is the difference between merging the black cube and the blue sphere instead of just connecting the blue sphere to High Res Input?

Secondly, is there a way to have an antialiased color baking ? You can see the second screenshot with a 512 map.
Without antialiasing it's not super sexy to show to my boss and for a production.

My pipeline is to generate masks for substance or mari.

Thanks again for your help,
Greetings,
Fred

lebref
Hi Paul,

Thanks for your answer that's helpful, this is exactly what i'm looking for.

I open your hip file and when I click bake, it's not working on my houdini ( 17.5.173 Apprentice )
Maybe because my GameDev Maps Baker is still in Beta:
I'm on the 1.173 release, should I try the 1.183 version?

Actually I made the same process on a new scene with a cube and a blue sphere.

If I merge the black cube with the blue sphere then connect it to high resolution geometry input,
my color channel is only with the black color.

When I only connect the blue sphere to the high res input, I got my blue sphere on the color bake channel but it's not correct as you can see on the screenshot.

What is the difference between merging the black cube and the blue sphere instead of just connecting the blue sphere to High Res Input?

Secondly, is there a way to have an antialiased color baking ? You can see the second screenshot with a 512 map.
Without antialiasing it's not super sexy to show to my boss and for a production.

My pipeline is to generate masks for substance or mari.

Thanks again for your help,
Greetings,
Fred

As for why it isn't working.. Probably because I set the resolution too high. Apprentice can't render at that resolution.

The reason you need to plug in the black mesh is due to how the tracing logic works. It basically casts a ray outwards from your lowpoly mesh surface, and then back inwards. The back inwards part will therefore either hit the cube (when merged in), or the sphere (when not plugged in). I will add cage mesh support at some point, preventing you from having to do that. For now, what I can do is expose the distance of that ray. Please file an RFE here: https://www.sidefx.com/bugs/submit/ [www.sidefx.com] Same goes for anti-aliasing.

PS: Apprentice is not meant to be used in production.

Hi Paul, thank you for your time.

I'm on Apprentice now because at my office they are working on Blender and I really expect that we should go on houdini for the task I'm going to have to do( Modeling and baking human body : a huge amount of muscles/fibers,etc ) .
So actually I'm only on trial version to research the good pipeline.

I should show them good reasons to buy or rent houdini
I think it's getting close but it's in need of antialiasing.

I was on Softimage and its rendermap engine is/was very easy and responsive to produce high quality baking on vertex color or on bitmap.
Usually I didn't need to customize cage parameter. the other options are similar to your game baker.

The main and very important option needed is the pixel border padding parameter and a quality parameter, something like 0=no antialiasing(super fast) to 3= very high antialiasing.

Last question(sorry if it's not on the good place, please tell me where to ask)

when i bake on houdini ROP> bake texture, and with games baker, I got a blurry bake: everything is blurry.
Do you know why is this happening ? I checked all and still don't know what i'm doing wrong.

Greetings from France,
Fred

Ambrosiussen
Hi James,

This is what the Maps Baker generates for Alpha:

Is this not what you expect?

Paul

Hey Paul, thanks for the reply.
Ok, figured it out. I'm using 1.173 production build. If I update to 1.184 it works as you showed. Any chance you could update the production version?

Is there any way to anti-alias the alpha channel edge? I suppose I could render it double size then downscale it but seems a bit pointless.

Hi, I tried this baker and here are some of my thoughts.

1)Super impressed with the speed, my favorite thing about the baker really.

2)How feasible it is to add support to rounded edge shaders and pack & instancing? Mantra understands both of those features when using the Simple Baker and they're quite an advantage over using external solutions.

3)More map types are needed. Thickness, Bent Normals, Material Color/ID for example would be great(and support for Alpha Maps in Simple Baker too, please).

4)I heard at one the Siggraph videos that from a baking standpoint Maps Baker will be the GameTool's team main focus. Is that really the case? Because unless there's a way to bypass its limitations I think it would be valid to have an alternative like Simple Baker that does make use of a render engine, and with Karma coming it could be faster to fire up than the current Simple Baker.

Hello Paul,

I'm on the last line to build the process for my job.
Still on houdini apprentice on these days but I should be migrating on Indie soon.

Bake from HD data to low def is OK with simple maps baker.

I'm looking forward to make a UV mask with a border padding of X pixel.
To get this mask I'm going to a simple map baker who has got this option.

As I have a huge amount of objects to generate UV mask, i have to use bake tools.

my wish is to get png file like the one clean B&W joined in this message.

So I plug the object in simple maps baker SOP with a white point color.
but: when i bake the object, the map is generated in black ( even if I plug the object in both entries)

And last for the least, with this process, the map outside is blurry with a strange lighting effect.

Can you help me about this?
What is the process to get a Png file with my UV filled in white with a border padding like the screenshoot joined in my message?

I'm coming from softimage/XSI and 3Dsmax before , and i don't understand this situation

Thanks a lot , greetings from France.
Fred

Hi there!
Can maps baker do UDIMs?
thank you

Hey all!

We are trying to use the maps baker for maps that are going to be rendered in redshift.
We're not displaying correctly height and normal maps, is there any particular setting we should apply somewhere?

thanks!

Ambrosiussen
At request of a user, here is how to use the Maps Baker with PDG

Hi, extreme handy example. Got maps to bake, but cant figure out how to load workitem related bgeo-file in that maps Baker rop. Would replace that pighead with file-node. Before just used workitem attributes starting with @* to get wanted file, but that pyton launching hip file dosent seem to pass attributes into that rop? Tried also with $, but no luck. What could be the correct way?

*For ROP creating FBX I am just using $HIP/geo/`@FBX_NAME`_w`@W`_hd`@H`_v`@V`.bgeo.sc as geometry file in file-node (that is connected to ROP FBX), but it dosent work with the map baking method via pyton code.

Wanted to check and see if there was an update on whether the maps baker would be able to support the rounded edge feature of the principled shader? The old simple baker seems to be able to do this, but it quite slow by comparison (and I don't know if it is still intended for use? Somewhat confused by the multiple tools to do the same thing). Thanks!

Stephen

Hi I am using the maps baker 3.0. When i try baking the maps, only the transferred maps(diffuse and normal) are generated correctly the other maps such as the height, curvature and vertex colour look messed. I'm attaching the maps. Please take a look and help me out.

Hi,

I found the issue and fixed it. Update Labs tomorrow and itll be gone

Paul

Ambrosiussen
Hi,

I found the issue and fixed it. Update Labs tomorrow and it'll be gone

Paul

Hi Paul, thanks for the quick response. I updated to release 537. The maps seem to be better, but the height maps seem to have this weird grid pattern all over it, looks like the wireframe of the low poly mesh is projected over the map.

Hi Paul,
It'll be nice if you could fix the height map issue, I have a project on hold.

Just for people coming to this post… Heightmap baking has been updated to provide more options for remapping.
The grid pattern is not a bug, but expected outcome as explained here: Link [twitter.com]

Hey Paul.
I have strange behavior with cage input and cage visualizing on. Displayed cage is duplicated.
In the video I initially use `surface normal` mode and then I switch to cage. In the meantime I am changing the max trace distance slider.

Ambrosiussen
Just for people coming to this post… Heightmap baking has been updated to provide more options for remapping.
The grid pattern is not a bug, but expected outcome as explained here: Link [twitter.com]

Depends on the render engine. Vray displacement requires you to bake height map from the highpoly and subdivided lowpoly.
Adding option to subdivide lowpoly for heightmap calculations could be useful.

Hi All

Does the map baker support multimple materials on the source object by any chance? I have a ground plane with lots of rocks on top and each roch has different materials. I wanted to bake all into a one texture set , but the result was broken.

Any ideas how to make it work ?

Cheers
Karoly