Feature suggestion: Bake curvature, AO, height etc inside UE4

General Feedback & Requests
1

I know this sounds like a unnecessary feature, because we can bake in xNormal, S. Painter, S. Designer etc etc… But I was baking a model here, then while making a graph in Substance Designer I realized that this specific material (its network) will be better made in UE4, because of some adaptive stuff (snow on top etc). Then I realized I just needed the normal maps, a curvature map and an AO/cavity map. The rest I’ll parameterize in UE4…
To the point: if we had a baker for input maps in UE4 we would skip/save some time opening softwares, renaming etc. I know the naming schemes can be automated in these softwares, but it also takes some time, and for a newbie is another set of tutorials to watch.
The idea would be, the standard stuff:

  • Browse to the high poly
  • Choose the maps to bake and its settings
  • Bake
  • Delete all caches.
  • Choose compression modes, mip LOD bias etc (this is up to the user. UE4 already offer this).

I don’t know how much it’s worth the effort to implement. Just a thought here while repeating baking steps.

2

Probably this could be done using Render Targets and some shader math, but unfortunately I’m not that good at material/shader math. Also we would need an optimized way (dedicated window etc) to point to a high poly source.

3

It would take more than that for it to work, for example setting up the projection cage

4

Unreal is not an asset creation tool

5

That is not true! UE already is asset creation tool as you are able to combine meshes and bake complex materials and thus in process create new assets you can reuse or even export for additional processing outside of editor itself. :wink:

6

Yeah right…Unreal is an asset creation tool.As it allows to bake complex materials and thus allows us to create new assests dqfansurvey