This is probably going to sound like a stupid question but bear with me.

How would I go about baking normals in Houdini, I ask because there are painting applications like Substance Designer/Painter (which I got in the steam sale a few months back and have yet to play with ops and the new Quixel suite which I'm hoping to try out - and they seem to need normals baking.

I'm a bit unclear on this area of Houdini to be honest and I can't seem to find any tutorials that don't skip over the details. I know to throw down a uv texture/project or whatever, but beyond that I'm a bit lost.

My Problem is I've watched a lot of tutorials especially on digital tutors and they usually use pre-built assets with uvs etc already applied or generated and all they do is lay down a uv-texture or project and bobs your uncle.

I feel like I'm missing something so if someone can point me in the right direction, whether to a tutorial on the internet that can shed some light, or whatever, that would be greatly appreciated!

TLDR:

- how do you bake normals in houdini?
- are there any guides on UV creation for objs I've created/imported?

In terms of baking the node you're looking for is the bake texture render node:

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/nodes/out/baketexture [sidefx.com]

The rendering tutorial on the sidefx site goes over how to use the bake texture node, which allows you to bake a variaty of handy maps, including normal maps:

https://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3164&Itemid=412 [sidefx.com]

If you're going to be loading the mesh in Substance Designer you can bake relevant maps out there, which might be easier, as it does curvature maps along with normal and ao maps. I can't recall exactly how to do it, but iirc you just right click on the object in tree view and select Bake Textures (or sth similar). Note that Substance has a 4k limit on texture size though.

As to UVs, it kind of depends on the object, but have a look at the UV Flatten, UV Unwrap and UV Layout.

You may find this helpful - we added a few examples on the bake texture node a couple weeks ago.

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/examples/nodes/out/baketexture/BakeHirestoLowres [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/examples/nodes/out/baketexture/BakeSimple [sidefx.com]

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.0/examples/nodes/out/baketexture/BakedUVs [sidefx.com]

Thanks for the help guys, it's appreciated.

To be honest I originally looked at the sidefx tutorial above but it was too heavy on the detail for me to get my head around. But since you mentioned it again I've now skipped to the end where they actually walk through using the bake node, and it's as simple as pressing a few buttons (doh). I think taking the end of that tutorial and sticking it in the quick start section would be super helpful for folk like myself.

With regards the example files, my Houdini help doesn't have the ones you've linked to - do I have to update my whole Houdini installation to get those?

Do you have any tuts on baking normals in a format suitable for use in Unity. When I simply bake N into a separate plane, there is no default option in the baker node to do so, the result is entirely different to what I get when I bake N from a high res mesh using Substance designer. The Houdini one doesn't work in Unity for shading.
I guess you have to roll your own shader to do this, but that seems to negate the point of having the bake renderer?

In the tutorial the speaker mentioned a Bake Shader which is missing from 15.5.607. Using Mantra surface or Principal Shaded produce 0.5 uniform result for Tangent Normals.