In this video, we'll use Marmoset to bake a normal, an ambient occlusion, and a color ID map. [MUSIC] Now we're ready to organize this to start bringing these pieces into Marmoset and do our initial baking. A couple of these objects are very high resolution, as we can see from my HUD. And I'm using Maya LT, which only limits media about a quarter of a million verts, as far as an export goes or triangles. And so I'm going to be exporting out just the pieces that were not done in Zbrush. And then I'll be bringing the Zbrush models in separately, as the OBJs I created from Zbrush. So it's important that I separate these pieces out, and I only export just these models. because you could see, in terms of my vert count, I came in just under a quarter of a million verts here, with everything smoothed. So now I'm selecting the cap, the battery pack, the body, anything else that I did. And I'm going to pull it out of my high group for now, just to make it easier for me to keep everything organized. And I can identify what I'm exporting and what I'm going to keep here. And this is a good time too to rename these objects so they have names that match up with each other, which is going to make organizing everything much, much simpler. So I'm choosing to combine things like the objective lenses with the objective lens frame so that I can more easily match up which objects are going to be baked onto my low poly. Basically anything that I have in my low poly, I want to combine the high poly objects so that we have the same number of objects here. It's going to make importing and organizing inside of Marmoset much, much quicker. So before I just sort of named things what I thought they should be named, I kept things separate. And now I'm just combining these high poly objects and trying to make sure that the map names match up between the high and low poly, just switching out _low for _high. When you're done with that, you just select the entire high group. And now we're going to export this as one entire object. I'm going to name this TS1440 High, and I'm just going to turn off everything but smoothing groups on this one. For my low poly here, I want to make sure that my UVs are all set, that I have everything correct. And click my low poly group, and make sure you delete your history. And then I want to export selection and name this low. I want to turn on tangents and binormals, this is going to work better with substance painter. And now what I do is I come into my Reset, I load up a new baker, I'm going to use the quickloader, To bring in all of the objects that I use for my scene. I have a quick video on how to use this in our Quick Start videos in week zero. We can see everything's been brought in. And of course, the objects that were not part of the Maya export, the high poly objects, do not have the materials that we want on them. So we're going to need to organize everything in here and we're going to need to make sure we put everything at the right spot. Now, what's happened is it's automatically brought most of the things in based on name, and lined them up as high and low poly. So it's pretty easy for me to just turn off the low poly, and then I can drag in everything that goes onto the high poly to make sure all my materials are still properly represented. And those all got imported in, so we can see that the high poly bake group has the high, and it's going to need the cap, as well as the low poly geometry. So I do a quick click on everything, and it lights up to make sure it has all of the pieces I need in there. Just do a quick click on to see which one's which, and drag that into the high group for battery switch. Same thing for the battery pack. And one of the nice things as a baker about Marmoset is it actually has transform tools, so I can move and shift things around just in case. In this case, in my import, my battery pack coming from Zbrush isn't in quite the right spot. So I can make some adjustments to both the battery pack and the battery switch. Now, with that, I'm going to save my scene before I do my bake, just to make sure that I don't have to redo all this in case something crashes. Baking is a very GPU intensive process and things can go wrong. I'm going to turn off the high poly, so I can just see the low poly version of everything. And I want to change a couple settings here. I'm going to set the tangent space to Maya instead of Marmoset, it's going to work with Substance Painter better. So now I'm going to turn off the high poly, and I'm going to click the little preview bake. Now, you notice I have under Maps only normals are selected, and I'm choosing to do a resolution of 2048 by 2048. This is going to give us a nice little preview bake. And I work with this before I bake any other maps, normals bake pretty quickly. I get these little black lines, that's because the reflectivity is set to be more like metal. I just set the reflectivity to metalness, and cranked that metalness value all the way down to get rid of those strange black lines and everything. We can see that there's a couple errors, a couple regions in my bake that don't line up quite that well. Fortunately, this is where we use that offset and skew tools that are one of the reasons people really like Marmoset for this sort of thing. So just set a white value on your little skew brush. And then it's pretty easy, your offset brush and we can paint that away. But as long as you've done a pretty good job with your low poly of lining things up, it should work pretty well. One thing we can do too is we see on some of these long seams painting this skew, nice and straight, we'll solve some of the warping we get in these scenes, And help straighten those lines. The reason we do this skew is as we get closer to edges, it's trying to turn the normals for the bake. And we just want to identify that especially when we're further away from the edges, like in this case we want this to be a free straight on feature, that we want these skewed out. Just using the eye icon there to quickly turn off some of my low poly bake regions to make it easier to see the whole seam. This is actually a very quick and easy way compared to how we used to have to solve problems like skewing, which often involved baking multiple versions of mats, maps, and blending them together by hand. We can see it's going to do a much better job of hiding some of the skewing that we were having previously. We paint a little offset in some of the areas that are part of our floaters here. Basically, since our floaters are sitting on top of the model, we need to push a little further away from the surface of the low poly to make sure we capture all of the seams that we have there. So if you recall, when we paint white, we push the cage away from something, when we paint black, we push it closer. Let's take a look down at the battery pack here. We can see that we kind of get this clipping happening here on the little pads, we can see them flattening out. So we do just a little bake offset, and it pushes that part of the bake further away, and we'll get back to seeing in just those corners, as well as doing a little skew baking. For this whole shape on the inside of the model, we'll help straighten out these features and make this particular groove in the bottom of our battery pack stand out a lot better. So just rotate around your model, look for any trouble spots or any mistakes or errors. Generally, we're looking for a very clean bake, although there's going to be some tiny errors and small issues, especially when you zoom in really closely. You always have to consider what's the distance someone in a game environment might look at something like this. And this is also why often artists will limit how close you can get. I like what I'm seeing here though, so I'm setting up my resolution to 4K instead of 2K. I want to create a little bake group here. In addition to baking my normals, I'm also going to be baking my ambient occlusion and material ID map. I could also bake these in Substance Painter, but I find Marmoset's baker is a little bit better and these skew tools really help. Now, this is going to take a while, ambient occlusion takes a lot longer to bake than a normal map. And the material ID will also take a little bit of time. So you're going to have to wait a little while, it takes longer than the normal map. But when you're done, you should have a nice set of three maps that we can use as the basis for our texturing. Now that the bakes are done, we're ready to move on to the the next stage, which is to open up Substance Painter and start lining in some of our initial materials. [MUSIC]
