How to bake glass and metal object on unique texture
Discussion started by MS--Studio
Hi everyone,
I'm trying to bake in a single texture of objects with different materials, for my sideboard project, with Blender.
The object is composed of three materials: wood, brass and glass.
So I made the textures diffuse, roughness, normal and as for the wood, the single texture reproduces quite faithfully the material.
The problem are the glass and brass, for which I can not do the correct baking.
I think it would be missing the tetxture for the metallicity, for the brass parts and the transmission (or transparent?) for the glass parts, but I do not know how to do it. Or rather I tried to make them, looking for tutorials or guides on the net, but I could not understand much. In fact the baked brass material is not as realistic as the original and the glass is totally opaque.
Does anyone know how to make the bake for these two materials?
Thanks for the help!
Answers
1
Sorry, I got a little confused.
If I connect the color node of the image texture to the alpha node of the principled, everything is transparent, even all the other meshes.
If I connect the alpha node of the image texture to the alpha node of the principled, the glasses are reflective but not transparent.
Eevee can't render glass as real glass with IOR (Index Of Refraction) for now. Only transparency controlled by Alpha input of Principled Shader(0 - full transparency, 1 - full opacity). For realistic glass material you have to use Cycles and use Transmission input of Principled Shader to control transmission level(0 - no transmission, 1 - full transmission). With Principled Baker you can bake transmission in separeted texture and then plug it to Transmission input.
In fact I used Cycles and I connected the input texture transmission to the transmission node of the principled, setting Blend Mode in all possible choices: Alpha Clip, Alpha Blend, Alpha Hased, but the result does not change: reflective but not transparent glass.
1
Through the Principled Baker add-on I was able to bake all the textures needed for my model.
Now the wood and brass look similar to the original materials.
The only problem is the glass objects. For this material it doesn't work. The glassware is reflective, but not transparent.
I don't know how to do it, surely I am doing something wrong, but I don't know what.
on the principal shader node there should be an alpha channel. This is where you plug in your texture for transparency. You will not be able to see the transparency until you change the material settings in the object properties panel. You should see opaque somewhere, change that to alpha blend, or another option. Hope this helps! =)
Because of clumsy fingers I gave you comment a negative rating. I meant the opposite of course.
Try Principled Baker addon. It makes easy to bake texture sets.
https://github.com/danielenger/Principled-Baker
2
I've used Blender pretty extensively. I assume you're trying to create a PBR material? I had trouble when I first started with PBR so I'll try to break it down as simply as I can. It sounds to me like your problem may be with the Roughness map, so I'll explain that a little more.
Diffuse - Base color/texture. Put the color of your wood, glass, and metal on this map.
Normal - This is faux geometry baked into the texture.
Ambient Occlusion - Faux Shadows.
Height - Similar to Ambient Occlusion, but this map can also be used to displace the geometry of your model.
Metallic - Black and White map to define areas of metal and non-metal. White = Metal, Black = Non-Metal.
Transmission - Same thing as Metallic. White = Glass/Transparent, Black = opaque.
Roughness - This map defines the intensity/specular of your other maps. This map is extremely important for your Metal and Transmission maps. White = Low Intensity/Specular, Black = High Intensity/Specular. Grey values are important for this map. What I mean by intensity is this; You may have a Transmission map to define glass areas, but if the roughness map is completely white in that area, the transparent area is going to have a very low "intensity" of Transmission. Same goes for Metallic. You have to use the Roughness map in unity with the other maps. If you want a shiny metal area, you need a WHITE Metal map with a BLACK roughness map. You can use grey-scale to adjust for scratches or dirt.
It's also worth mentioning that some maps use Non-Color Data as a setting. Transmission, Metallic, and Normal to name a few.
My goal is to create a PBR material to then create the relative textures of the objects in single map, through the bake of materials, so that those who will buy my models can have the textures already ready to apply to the model.
I just went through the same process of having to learn the PBR workflow with Blender, so I know exactly what you're dealing with. If you haven't already, I highly recommend learning Procedural Textures as well. It's a time consuming/complicated/frustrating process, but definitely worth it.
I made the Metalness textures (where in the metal/glass areas there is white and in the remaining areas black) but when I went to recreate the material to apply to the sideboard, as mentioned at the beginning the glass is opaque and the metal not real.
Thanks for the advice Empire-Assets.
There is so much I need to learn, too much! I thought it would be easier when I started.
If I used Substance Painter would it be easier for textures instead of Blender? Would it be worth it?
2
This is what is called "Complex material setup" (If I understand what you are trying to achive). You have diffuse, roughness, normal. To be able to use single texture with materials wood, brass and glass, you need RGB mask. RBG mask is another texture, baked from high poly model wich will tell what part of the texture is what material. So for example you have 2048x2048 cut in 4 512x512 boxes. First box 512x512 is red color this define what part of the texture will be brass, second 512x512 is green and this define part of the texture that use transparency/glass, third 512x512 is blue this defines wood etc etc. Its kinda hard to explain here on forum, I also don't use blender and I don't know how to setup that in blender, but I do know that blender support RGB mask.
Just to clear things up, you can't bake Diffuse, normal, specular, gloss, etc etc into one texture. You can have Single texture with different versions of it, wich contains different informations, (diffuse, normal, specular etc.)
You can bake some of these into a single texture, its called Texture Packing/ORM. So you can have your Occlusion in Red Channel, Roughness in Green Channel, Metalness in Blue Channel. Its usually used for PBR/GLTF realtime workflow.
There are many ways to bake all sorts of information. Author didnt mentioned what is the purpose of the asset so I go "generic". Baking in the rgb channels is avoided in most cases in real time instead different uv channels are used. At the end everything depends of the purpose of the asset and where asset will be used.
Actually baking in the RGB channels is recommended for GLTF formats for optimization. An yes everything depends on the purpose, I was just highlighting the fact you mentioned you 'cant bake' into one texture, when indeed its the recommendation for this format. I agree however for regular assets I wouldn't do it myself.
Baking into texture is one thing, baking into rgb channels of it is another. When I write here on the forum I always start with generic stuff because i assume that knowladge of the topic author is limited. You can custom code anything and everything.
Thanks for the comments!
My goal is to make textures for the model that I will put up for sale on the site, so that even possible buyers who don't have Blender can have the material textures to apply.
My knowledge of texture bake is very limited, I have just started in this area.
2
This may be a bad answer, as I am not a Blender model-builder and am unfamiliar with Blender rendering emgines and shaders. However, as a general rule, you cannot combine diaelectric and non-diaelectric materials in a single texture file. At least, not that I am aware of. The general practice is to use separate material map sets for diaelectric materials (glass, etc.) and for diffuse/lambert types of materials. If I were making a model with wood, brass and glass components, I would make three different material sets. For something like a "sideboard" model, you could use very small (512x512 pixels) map sets for the glass and for the brass, unless the glass is etched (has a lot of detail) and the brass is etched or weathered (has a lot of detail). Then you could make the wood texture a reasonable 1024x1024 pixel size, or whatever size you need. Three material maps sets of these sizes should not overly burden any rendering engine.
Anybody, please correct me if I am wrong. In Maya Arnold of Maxwell render, I just cannot imagine how a person would go about creating a single texture file set that has diffuse, transparent, transmission, metallic and non-metallic properties for different areas of the single map.
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