Hello all,

I've got a cluttered mesh of a large structure from some scanning software (not sure what I've just been asked to work it!).

I was able to generate some clean geometry using some elevation drawings and now my client would like get the colors from the mesh and project or bake them onto the clean geometry.

Not sure where to begin- any clues or keywords to start with?

Thanks!

Hey there,

Independtly from how you put the colors on the mesh, you first need some proper, non-overlapping UVs. After that you could use the “bake texture rop”.
What do you mean with “colors from the mesh”?
Was there already color information on the imported geometry?
If so, you could simply try “Attribute transfer SOP” to transfer color from the imported geo to the clean one.

Hope that helps,
Cheers

Thanks!

That's it.

The imported messy geometry is a 3d mesh built from some scanning software- it has some pretty decent color on it already but the actual geometry is awful.

The geo I've modeled in Houdini is pretty clean and I've done some simple UV work.

I'll give attribute transfer a try!

Thanks!

The attribute transfer will be limited in resolution by the destination mesh, which may be too low.

The bake texture rop allows transferring shader exports from one object to another, using the uv coordinates of the bake object. The source object does not need to have uv coordinates. The material on the source needs to be configured to export the color you desire to bake into a texture.

For very simple geometry color -> texture bake operations, you might look into the Game Baker tool that ships with the game dev toolkit. It vastly simplifies the process but is limited to only baking geometry color.

Thanks jsmack,

That makes sense. I tried a very simple test using a tube with many rows/columns and added some color using a pointVOP (normals to Cd).

I used attribute transfer to move the color to the target mesh.

The target geo has UVs but is very low resolution so that explains why the bake to texture rop just produced a white mesh! (or at least I think…)

I got the Game Baker working without issue! That's all I need for this project.

However, I'd like to understand how the bake texture rop works as well.
What needs to be done to the source mesh?

I've got UVs on my low res target mesh. Both objects have just a simple principledshader on them (not the same one) and the one assigned to the hi-res src mesh has “use point color” ticket on.

When I go to bake the texture it comes up all white!
As usual I feel like I'm missing something right in front of my face.

Thanks again! GameBaker is exactly what I'm after for now!