Baking Models for Unity

[3dreamstudios]

Looking into using Unity for some virtual reality oculus rift fun!

Wondering if there are any tips/shortcuts to baking models. Typically we do architectural scenes with ton's of items. I'm guessing each item would have to be baked out.

But what about surfaces that don't have UV maps. I use alot of octane box projection with my surfaces...quick and simple to develop. Would these have to be UV to bake properly?

Anyone else done anything similar? Thanks.

[FrankPooleFloating]

Yes. You won't get far without UVs. And Atlas UVs will give crappy results, imho. Best to unwrap stuff, whenever possible. And break scenes up into smaller/logical chunks (group of objects combined if you can), with optimal use of UV islands, to squeeze the most out of each map.

[3dreamstudios]

Yes. You won't get far without UVs. And Atlas UVs will give crappy results, imho. Best to unwrap stuff, whenever possible. And break scenes up into smaller/logical chunks (group of objects combined if you can), with optimal use of UV islands, to squeeze the most out of each map.

What's your go-to unwrap tool for Lightwave? I agree atlas is not super smart at times. Great for an oblong box but... Certainly would have to have each object or groups of objects have their own UV's to keep the map sizes way down and with details....

Thanks for anymore thoughts...

[FrankPooleFloating]

A combination of ABF and plg_Make_UV, for now. I haven't looked into what else is available lately. And honestly, I have only done a couple bake tests, but the one I did with Atlas looked like poo, and my unwrapped one looked sweet. But maybe this is a matter of actually spacing (walls, floors etc) optimally, and tweaking the Padding Size and Edge Noise Tolerance. I haven't gotten far enough into yet to determine what is the best solutions for rooms etc, but like I said, unwrapping did give nice results.

Do us both a favor and do a quick test with everything done with Atlas, keep the default of 20 Relative Gap and do some tests with various settings in bake cam... I did want to get back to some more testing, but I have a deadline and need to keep cranking...

[FrankPooleFloating]

Doing some more bake testing.. as it turns out, Atlas is not too bad after all. I was originally testing bakes by re-mapping bake in Modeler, but because I had GL texture res set at 2k (d'oh!), that made things look worse than they really were. And just doing Atlas UVs with default bake cam settings is getting good results. How are things going for you, 3dreamstudios?

I have not touched Unity in quite a while. This would be a good excuse to play with that again. But first, I am going to pop my baked test stuff in WebGL and check it out there...

[3dreamstudios]

Good to know. I actually found a nice plugin for surfacing without UV's for Unity. But it still doesn't help with baking lights in Unity....lightmaps will still need UV's to work with.

Workflow progress....