HD_Tools_Bake_Maps - Diffeomorphic/import_daz GitHub Wiki

Bake Maps

True HD meshes are not well suited for posing, since the vertex count is very high (and no vertex groups are loaded!). The preferred workflow is to bake the HD data to normal or displacement maps, which can then be added to the mesh at base resolution. This combines a light-weight mesh for animation with the high-frequency detail in renders.

Fortunately, Blender has a built-in tool for baking normal and displacement maps from a multires modifier. Since it can be rather tricky to set up the mesh for baking, in particular since UV coordinates must be moved to the first tile, the DAZ Importer has a tool for this. To use the Bake Maps tool, the blend file must first be saved and textures must be copied to that location, using the buttons in the Materials section.

Warning: The Bake Maps tool crashes when I try it on my Windows 7 computer, but it works well under Windows 10.

bake maps.png

Select the multires HD mesh and press Bake Maps.

  • Bake Type: Normal map or Displacement map.
  • Image Size: Size of the bakes textures.
    • 512 : 512 x 512 pixels
    • 1024 : 1024 x 1024 pixels
    • 2048: 2048 x 2048pixels
    • 4096: 4096 x 4096 pixels
  • Subfolder: Baked map are stored in folder "textures/normals/subfolder" directory under the directory of the
  • Base Name: Normal textures are named "base name_NM_image size.png", and displacement textures are named "base name_DISP_image size.png".
  • Single Tile: Only bake map for a single tile.
  • Single Tile To Bake: An integer in the range 1001 - 1100.

normal maps.png

Here are the normal maps for all tiles, image size 2048. Note the directory at the top.

disp maps.png

And here are displacement maps, image size 1024.