Baking

Description

DecalMaster provides the Bake Decals tool. The tool is integrated directly into Maya enabling you to bake Decals, Flows & Trim Sheets texture maps entirely within Mayas 3D viewport at the click of a button.
The texture maps baked are: normal map, height map, ambient occulusion map, curvature map, alpha mask & the subset mask, flows also bake the material 2 mask. The texture maps are channel packed into 3 png files to reduce storage space and improve rendering performance in Maya.

To access the tool, go to DecalMaster > Create > Bake Decals located on the Maya menu bar.

Global Bake Settings

The Bake Decals tool provides multiple options to set the quality and resolution of the maps, as well as other options to control the appearance of some texture map features such as the height map depth or ao map softness, allowing you to create high quality bakes without the need to use multiple applications.

• Quality

  This alters how many rays Arnold casts into the scene, making for crisper edges and less noise throughout the texture maps. This setting can greatly increase baking times.

• Resolution

  Keep in mind how large the decal should be when placed on a surface and how close the observer will get to that surface when choosing the resolution of decals. Trim Sheets require larger texture maps as well. Each increase in resolution roughly quadruples baking times.

• Bit Depth

  Some texture maps benefit from 16 bit depth because they are used in floating point calculations for lighting or surface information, like the normal map, curvature map and the ao map. This option is available when quality is priority.

• Smoothing

  This number represents the radius of pixels that are being blended together to reduce jagged edges and noise.

• AO Map Samples

  This is a multiplier of the Quality. Ambient occlusion requires a large amount of rays to avoid a very noisy result. This setting can greatly increase baking times.

• AO Map Contrast

  This number increases or decreases the contrast between white and black. Lower numbers flatten the values while higher values make details pop.

• Curvature Map Samples

  This is a multiplier of the Quality. Curvature requires a large amount of rays to avoid a very noisy result. This setting can greatly increase baking times.

• Curvature Map Radius

  This number represents the radius of pixels a curve affects. Higher values lead to wider curvature lines.

• Curvature Map Contrast

  This number increases or decreases the contrast between white and black. Lower numbers flatten the values while higher values make details pop.

• Height Map Distance

  If the decal extends upward beyond 1 unit in the Y axis it will be clipped by the baking camera. This allows you to ensure the entire decal is captured without clipping.

• Height Map Contrast

  This number increases or decreases the contrast between white and black. Lower numbers flatten the values while higher values make details pop.

Decals

• Decal Name

  Optionally set this to an existing decal name to overwrite it.

• Add to Library

  Which library the decal will be stored in.

• New Library

  Use this to create a new decal library.

Flows

• Flow Name

  Optionally set this to an existing flow name to overwrite it.

• Add to Library

  Which library the flow will be stored in.

• New Library

  Use this to create a new flow library.

Trim Sheets

• Trim Sheet

  Optionally set this to an existing trim sheet library name to overwrite it.

• New Trim Sheet

  Use this to create a new trim sheet library.