Hi can anyone suggest a software for baking low poly normal/diffuse mapped models onto a plane (as one flat texture).
It would be handy to have AO and height maps as-well.
Apparently maya can do this but i don’t have much experience with maya and would prefer something else.
Price doesn’t matter
Max does this as well.
Not sure about other softwares.
Max and Maya are both programs with huge capabilities and therefore complex ui that take a while to learn. Im looking for something simple and intuitive like 3dcoat.
if anyone knows of good tutorials on maya/max baking (the way i described) then please say
Crazybump is a good one. 
Ok, so i got maya baking properly, but it is soooooo slow, are there any alternatives?
I need something that can bake high poly models onto low poly, that takes into account normal and diffuse maps on the high-poly mesh. like maya or max but not super slow for any kind of complex geometry. (slow = 5 hours to bake a diffuse and displacement map.)
Nobody recommended xNormal yet? www.xnormal.net
It’s free - it’s got a lot of features - it does not have a Mac Version yet.
Substance Designer also has an integrated baker and is synced to Unreal and Unity.
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It seems the settings in Maya need to be tweaked, or possibly the high resolution mesh is - overly detailed.
I’ve baked 3+mil poly models in less than an hour so the settings (lighting, resolution, AO bounce, AA filter setting, etc) in Maya need to be adjusted to speed up the process.
In addition to reducing the calculations in Maya there are post bake processes you can perform to enhance the maps after baking. Look into xnormal, and crazy bump, and of course no texture baking workflow is complete without Photoshop for fixing up all maps after initial baking is complete.
Based on OP I’m guessing the texture baking is for environmental maps so a character workflow might be a little different. From my experience there is no one off software that will do the job totally and completely.
There are several character development workflow tutorials that are useful and informative, showing multiple softwares are used to perfect a beautiful character texture bake. This one comes to mind and although dated - is still one of the best imo - Marcus Dublin Online Portfolio
+1 for xNormal. Overall a fantastic, speedy baker, but also has some slightly-hidden features and tools that work brilliantly.
Oh my!
How could I forget good ol’ xNormal?
How forgetful of me.
Another +1 for xNormal. Fantastic tool, although the user interface is complete trash. xNormal 4 will use Qt though, so there’s something to look forward to.
Be sure to download xNormal 3.18.10 and not the newest one. This lets you use the Unity tangent basis plugin, if you want your normalmaps to look good in Unity.
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I’m looking forward to xNormal 4 for several years (!) now. 
but xnornal doesn’t bake materials, only geometry.
What do you mean?
xNormal bakes as good as everything. Including Polypaint/Vertrexcolors.
If a result doesn’t look right it’s usually because of wrong settings in the respective baker.
Ok i will reword the origeonal question: I need software to bake textures, the bake must take into account any materials applied to the highpoly mesh (I.E normal and diffusemaps). maya does this but is very slow on complex models and doesnt produce very good quality normal maps.
If you need your maya internal materials baked onto another mesh you need to use Maya. I know of no 3rd program that bakes materials from within a 3D application.
Though I would advice to bake your normal, AO, displacement, etc… maps without materials and create the texture based off of those.
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why would you advise not to include materials in A.O, disp and normal maps?
Because Unity 5 uses real world lighting - and lighting reactive passes baked into textures will conflict when placed into scenes with real world lighting.
However I find baking very light, subtle AO into textures still adds depth to highly detailed textures without conflicting with real-time lighting. Yet I’ve only done this in 3D Max, not Unity.
Why should i not bake a highpoly model with normal mapped materials to a plane for use as a tilable texture.
Can you explain further in simple language.?
this guy does it http://www.polycount.com/forum/showpost.php?p=1590084&postcount=320
You can, I don’t think nobody said you shouldn’t - did we?
You are asking different questions each time you post. 
The link you provide - the guy really doesn’t provide enough explanation what is the intended end result. He states it helps “in Maya” when dealing with high resolution meshes to keep the frame rate up.
You may be inferring a desired end result from a post on polycount which is clearly being used in Maya not Unity.
I’d suggest running some tests yourself and coming up with some answers to the questions you have. And share with the community when you get some results.