Hello all!

So I have begun attempting to learn how to use Houdini as a Substance Designer alternative. (Not that I have ever used SD in any capacity before)

So I think I got the basics down, up until the texture baking where I am having two main issues at the moment.

1. Normal map bakes as a black image.
2. Roughness map bakes with a gradient.

As I already been stuck for a couple of hours trying to figure out why it wouldn't bake anything at all, I feel I would rather ask for help than try to spend another couple hours in vain. (The plane I was using was just one single polygon, and subdiving it fixed the baking problem)

Also, some critique on how I went about creating the material would also be more than helpful!

Best Regards
//Morgan

Hey Morgan, without looking at your scene (I am at home now), have you tried the housing 15.5 version of the operator? It is MUCH easier to use…!

grayOlorin
Hey Morgan, without looking at your scene (I am at home now), have you tried the housing 15.5 version of the operator? It is MUCH easier to use…!

Yes, I have been using that one

I believe the issue I am facing at the moment is at the shader level, I am clueless at how to go about converting the displacement to a normal map that I can bake out.

Pretty sure the normal is not even working at the moment.

Edit: Added Image



Edit2: Saw why my roughness is a gradient looking at my own image, so only the normal map problem persists!

(again without looking at your file so pure speculation…!)

what about just rendering the mesh twice? one with displacement (which in essence gives you a hi res model), and another one with your target UVs, then turn on normal map in the bake texture ROP?

grayOlorin
(again without looking at your file so pure speculation…!)

what about just rendering the mesh twice? one with displacement (which in essence gives you a hi res model), and another one with your target UVs, then turn on normal map in the bake texture ROP?

Sorry for late reply on my part, been a busy few days.

That is one way to do it, but should it not be possible directly within the material like I have it set up? Would be nice to skip that one extra step, especially if I have a lot of models to bake.

You most likely can, but depending on how you your setup works, you could make a digital asset which “hides” your whole setup under a nice and simple operator (it is really a matter of an object merge of the two objects into a subnet and setting your second object as a “phantom.” I think either way would be a valid approach

@grayOlorin Yes both are very valid approaches, but I am a bit stubborn and I want to try to get my way to work



So if we look at this node-network.

If I want to bake out the normal map from this material/shader, where/how would I input the normal map if I manages to properly convert the height/displacement information to normal information within the shader?

Any help is greatly appreciated!

Best regards
//Morgan

Edit:

Convinced myself to buy Substance Designer as I really want realtime preview of the materials I am creating. So this issue is not as urgent, but a solution is still interesting for future reference