Baked Textures

Graphics Shaders & Materials
1

Hey all - this whole idea of baking textures in max for import into Unity is pretty new to me. I was always using terrain tools in Unity for my levels, but now I’m recreating a cartoonish, low-poly part of a real city and could use some help!

I’m using 3ds Max 9, btw.

I’ve broken my ‘city’ into parts - the ground is one and each block of buildings is another. One block has 13 buildings which I’ve textured separately and then attached together in preserving materials, so that the whole block is one 3000 face mesh.

I hit render - it looks great.

Then I bake the textures…so basically, a map is created for the whole block of buildings. This is where the trouble starts. Even when I use a 2048x2048 targa, the file is still far too pixelated to be useful. For instance, when viewing the render (in unity or max) with the new baked UV applied, the bricks of the buildings turn ALMOST a monotone red. The cobblestones on the ground turn virtually monotone gray. Investigating, I open the map in photoshop, zoom in, and see how pixelated everything has become.

Aside from the prospect of doing every building separately, has anyone had any luck with this sort of texture baking?

I fear that doing each building by itself will result in almost one hundred buildings - 100 meshes and 100 textures…very time consuming to put together and i’d have to imagine incredibly resource taxing on the game…

Any and all help/advice is greatly appreciated!

2

You may have to resort to doing that if the result you want is only achievable by doing it that way.

Or you can simply try (by trial and error) to see how many buildings/blocks you can group together while maintaining the closest approximation of the resolution you want (sacrificing either texture quality or group number, or a bit of both).

3

Typically you use high-res textures for the buildings in one UV set, where all the buildings could potentially share a single texture. Though more usually you have several textures, depending on the variety of the buildings. Then you have the baked shadows in another UV set, which is much lower resolution because it’s spread over a large area. It sounds like you’re trying to bake everything into a single UV set, which would (as you note) not work very well.

–Eric