Question regarding textures...

[DustyShinigami]

Hi

There's something I'm curious about - for a university assignment, we're making a high to low poly game-ready character. I'm almost ready to begin baking in Painter, however I've had to use decimated meshes for my high poly assets, which I'm not too happy about. I've noticed they tend to leave a lot of dings and dents on the surface and those get transferred across in the bakes. When I decimated the meshes in ZBrush, they looked fine, and the detail was still there. It's a different ball game in other software though... For some stupid reason, my PC will no longer allow me to install 3ds Max or Maya, so I need to wait until I can reformat my PC. So in the meantime, I have to use them on my laptop, and it can't cope with the original high poly sculpts. It only just about managed with the decimated parts.

So my question is: if the UVs remain the same, and they're not modified in any way, is it possible to transfer the paint/texture work done in a Substance project if I re-bake the meshes with the original high poly sculpts at a later date?

Thanks

[CAGameDEV]

Re-baking with a different high poly can cause your work to change due to a difference in your mesh maps (curvature, AO, position, ect...) That difference might be minor of course, and maybe not even noticeable it just depends.

Is there a reason you're decimating a high poly mesh for baking? The only reason I could think of would be due to an inability to load it because of how heavy the mesh is... but other than that I don't see why you would do this.

[DustyShinigami]

Ahh, fair enough. Makes sense.

Yeah, it's simply my inability to load it. My tutor recommended I should decimate it, and my laptop wouldn't be able to handle it. Come to think of it, before Maya and Max decided to stop working on my PC, even my main computer struggled and crashed due to how dense the meshes were. Sadly, I've not been able to test them on my PC now that I've reduced the geo with ZRemesher.

[CAGameDEV]

If you're going to decimate you don't want to use zremesher because it changes too much. Use decimation master within zbrush directly.

[DustyShinigami]

Yeah, I did. I tried using ZRemesher first just to reduce the current polycount, which helped, but I used Decimation Master in ZBrush to get the assets as they are now. But no matter what I go for, the result is the same with the dings and dents.

[CAGameDEV]

If you can provide the mesh I'll take a look.

[DustyShinigami]

Well there's multiple parts to the mesh. I've split them up based on their texture size - so all the parts for 4K maps, all the parts for 2K maps etc.

I have a plan that I'm going to try. I really don't want to use decimated meshes at all. So I'm going to micro-manage things even more. I'll set up a new scene in Max just for all the 4K parts, 2K parts etc., and then try bringing in the original high poly meshes. See how my laptop copes. If not, I'll have to split things up even further, so I have 2-3 4K asset scenes in Max, do the baking, and then do some compositing in Photoshop so I can put all the texture map parts together. As in, put everything together for the Normal map, World Space Normal map, AO map etc. Then I should be able to bring in my entire low poly mesh in a new project and drop those maps in, right?