anyone else here using Flatiron for texture baking? if so what is the correct workflow when using vray?
I’ve used it only for unwrapping, I did the actual texture baking through the 3ds Max RTT a while back. Maybe it would be best to ask the FlatIron guys directly?
Best regards,
Vlado
Used it quite a bit last year, had a couple of issues that I cant remember but the Flatiron guys were really helpful. Worked great in the end, just that the unreal project was too beefy and nothing could run it…
*should* be straightforward overall IIRC
yeah waiting on their reply on the forums there, will look into RTT myself, not sure how the process is
what scene is considered too beefy?
my problem is the bake is too bright and ths shadows are too dark, other than that it seems to be ok, they have some statements online saying its some vray and gamma issue but not sure what to do, let me know how did you handle the whole gamma issue with them
yeah, sounds like a gamma issue. what filetype are you baking to? I’m not sure how flatiron ties into vray - but you can try changing the mode in color mapping, color mapping only, or gamma and color mapping. I’ve found with baking .exr’s, I haven’t had to texture bake with gamma baked in
tried many formats, left all vray options at default as they stated on flatirons site but not sure really, tried a few modes too, this one is bring done with vray 2.3 so not sure how that goes
Hmm. yeah this is why I was never a fan of Flatiron. Full automation sounds great, but the process is a bit complicated and at least for myself, I’ve enjoyed stepping through it semi-carefully. If you haven’t seen this already - https://www.quitenice.co/blog/2014/9/21/workflow-exploration-3dsmax-to-unity3d-updated - I still use a variation of this method with decent success. But most of my VR projects are internal only, so I don’t worry about having to clean up noise from render settings or baked textures being spread too thin. I think this is practically a manual way of doing what Flatiron does.
aha, i didnt try color mappig and gamma, had it on reinhard, will try that, its a scene with many elements so if this dont work will have to do it manually
I didnt do any mesh optimizing, and baked all the textures at 4k. Ran out of texture memory (or w/e its called, cant remember!) as soon as you walked out of the lift lobby. Once the SSR etc was added, good bye.
Also tried doing simpler baking, just individual diffuse textures and then lighting again in UE4. Eventually fell over after 50% of the furniture was added.
It was cool when it worked, but it really would have needed optimization.
How many elements? I’ve done up to around 200 - and can get through the process within a day for rendering. Using scripts you just might want to process in chunks since the software will hang. Baking of course takes additional time… helps to do a test run at a lower baking resolution to catch any issues. If you go this route, reach out via the website if you want to discuss things further and I can pass along the scripts I use.
less than 200 elements for sure alot less, maybe 40 or so, would love to do it via flatiron is possible since i dont want to spend time on it, if this gamma issue was not a problem i think its ok, i ran some tests and it seemed fine minus the gama issue. didnt have any slowdowns really and render was fast since its not some overly realistic scene
Well Goodluck! 
- I do love their UV-Packer plugin. But Flatiron just controls too much of the process. Which sucks when something goes wrong.
Yeah I’ve never had much luck with SSR in VR. Still using simple box mapped reflections to do an ok’ish job..
4k textures definitely will push the system, in the game engine can you downsize them? I know in Unity you can force them to be processed at a lower resolution. See if you can pin point the issue. My last VR demo was a 1mil poly scene with 75 2k baked maps. Threw in some reflection probes and it all ran smoothly.
Next steps certainly would be to go for 4k maps and break geometry up more so that the reflection probes can work better.
There will definitely be ways to get it running, my game engine skills are basically zero though. Still looking for a smooth and not labour intensive conversion between vray and game engine…
This scene was probably pushing 40mil polys..
Same boat my friend, very low experience with game engines. 40 mil is a lot! - I’d try to get it down to 5, maybe 10 mil would work.. I feel like that amount of geometry alone could kill the framerate. And since realistic spaces aren’t the same as video game levels, it’s harder to use things like mesh culling to alleviate the hi poly issue.
actually now the issue is been solved i think, problem was there is a button to use color mapping settings, seems its for vray, now it works as expected with Flatiron with no need to change anything in the settings of vray
Yeah tis a pain. You almost need double the time to finish the project and then convert to UE4.