Final Major Project - BAKING

 Baking..

and High to Low Poly Workflow

    Because of the style that I had chosen to build my entire project around, I didn't really need to use the process of baking the information from high poly models onto low poly models much. Prior to starting to project, I spent a lot of time playing Vampyr again and I noticed that a lot of the assets in that game looked plain and it was the textures that made them stand out. It's not a realistic style, the proportions are realistic, although there's a certain stylisation to everything.. and that's something that I really liked about this game in particular, and about any game with stylisation to it really.

    In some cases though.. baking is very much required. Because for example, I couldn't make a cloth that is old and wrinkled but is still optimised in terms of topology and doesn't have a ridiculous amount of triangles. At first I attempted and decreased the amount of triangles, although that made the cloth lose it's purpose - I deliberately made it in a way in which the viewer could tell that there's a body underneath it. Getting rid of polygons made those creases disappear, and that ruined the shape that I was going for.

High Poly and Low Poly

    Usually, if I don't have a High Poly, I tend to build the Low Poly onto the Low Poly in Substance Painter and I do that for every assets because of the texture maps. However, when there's a High Poly that needs to be baked onto a Low Poly, we want to place the two one on top of another in 3Ds Max (or whatever software you're using for 3D modelling), make sure they're named the same and only have an underscore and a High Poly and a Low Poly after, export both and import the Low poly into Substance Painter, then use the Texture Set Settings to select the High Poly model from wherever you've saved it on your computer and bake it onto the Low Poly. We only need to have unwrapped the Low Poly, not the High Poly.

3Ds Max Example

Baking

    Sometimes, baking doesn't always work right away. In this case, at first it gave me strange lighting issues and how I fixed them was going back to 3Ds Max and making sure that both the High Poly asset and the Low Poly asset are put in the centre - that way, I was sure that both models are right on top of one another. Then, I reexported them again and baked them and that fixed the strange lighting issue, so I assumed that sometimes if the objects are even just slightly apart, the baking may not work properly.

Texturing

Result

    The shining isn't a roughness map or an sRGB problem.. this time. Once again, I deliberately wanted the blood in this room to look as if it's been freshly spilled because the environment in that area's being used quite often. So in a way, that's also why I wanted that bed to just be shoved in the corner with a bloodied fabric on top of it, suggesting there's a person underneath whilst the other surgical bed towards the centre of the room is clean and unoccupied, and ready to be used. Whoever's been using the previous one was in a rush didn't really bother cleaning things up.

    What I would like to focus on next is getting more texturing done, as well as adding a dust particle system in my scene.