Can someone please point me in the right direction on how to use the new Texture bake features. The docs does not say anything about the Bake tab under the Mantra Surface, nor can I find any info on how to bake out cavity or thickness maps to UV.

Any ideas?

Hey Werner, have you looked at the texture bake ROP node? if you are using the one in 15.5 it should be a lot more straighforward than the one in 15.0

Thanks, I think I got it working now. My mind always wants to over complicate things.

Hi guys,

I'm beginning to feel like the most absurd jack-in-the-box, whenever somebody mentions the bake texture ROP, I jump out from nowhere…

Are you managing to get output to the tangent normal (that isn't just green and purple) and displacement channels?

I feel the baker is not that great compared to other bakers.. I tried to use it but soon I rather used substance painter to bake curvature maps etc. takes about 10 seconds while in houdini i just cant get similar results in a similar time frame. Mostly cause i have to fiddle around with settings.

Feel exactly like friedasparagus, anyone able to get tangent normal maps to work?

I noticed this on the logs:

Houdini 15.5.539 Resolved issue when baking tangent normal maps between low/high resolution objects. Previously we were computing the UV tangent basis using the current geometry, which was incorrect.
Added a VEX function to support this method, getuvtangents(), allowing sampling of UV tangents on arbitrary objects.

have you tried with the latest build? perhaps this is already fixed?

Hi,

yes I saw that too and got all excited. The tangent normals are generating just fine with the principled shader (not with the mantra shader though, even though the bake exports is in there), the displacement issue stills seems to be floating about.

I think it could well be the same thing, as the only way I can get the displacement channel to show any values is to set either a noise or texture based displacement on the shader on the hi-res object and even then it only returns the difference between the hi-res mesh and the effect of that displacement.

If you dig into it (unlocking the material also stops the bake from functioning, on all channels. Which put pay to my little debugging session ), there's a vex snippet in the bake outputs responsible for exporting the ‘Ds’ channel. But it doesn't reference the uvobject at all and if the displacement shader didn't run, just returns a zero vector… me thinks it might still be WIP

I haven't tried 15.5.539 yet, but 15.5.523 was not working for me at all the other day.

I have been using 15.0.347 for baking - not ideal obviously but in case anyone is tearing their hair out, give that a go.