Total Baker Documentation

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What is Total Baker?

It is a known fact that in general high-detailed models aren't suitable for real time rendering, so it's often necessary to reduce their complexity in terms of number of polygons and materials. Total Baker is a Texture Baking tool that allows you to create texture maps for low-poly models in order to make them look like more detailed.

Look at the following image.
The lowpoly model on the left initially appears very detail-less if compared to the highpoly model on the right, but after applying a normal map to it, the two models seem very similar. That normal map has been created by Total Baker.

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You can read the About texture baking page for more infos about texture baking.

Where to buy

Total Baker is available in the Unity Asset Store at this link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/total-baker-118159

Unity versions

Total Baker is compatible with Unity 2019.4 or newer.
It works in Editor only, so its functionalities won't be available in builds. The reason behind this is that the system relies on some Unity's features which aren't available outside the Editor.

Input

Total Baker needs 3 models to work: a highpoly model, a lowpoly model and a cage. Even if you can provide a custom cage, in most cases you can let the system automatically generate it from the lowpoly model. For each input model you can specify some useful options like normals smoothing and displayed shader type.
After choosing the input models, you have to choose the maps to be generated and then setup all the other baking parameters, which will be explained in the Functionalities section.

Supported map types

The supported maps are the ones commonly used by Unity's native shaders (Standard and Legacy). Total Baker can generate the following maps:

  • Diffuse
  • Normal
  • Height
  • Metallic
  • Specular
  • Ambient Occlusion
  • Emissive
  • Curvature
  • Mask (for HDRP Lit Shader)

Realtime preview

When you open the Total Baker window, a temporary scene is opened and the currrently opened scenes are closed (you are prompted to save them if they have unsaved changes). In this preview scene you will see the input models next to each other. In the following image you can note how the cage wraps the highpoly model like a shell. After a bake, all the generated textures are applied to the lowpoly model material so you can immediately visualize and validate the results in order to reduce the production iterations.

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Note: Total Baker's main algorithm needs to operate in a 1x1x1 volume. The input models spawned in the scene will be automatically resized to fit this restricted space, so don't worry if you see strange scale values.

When you close Total Baker, the preview scene is destroyed and the originally opened scenes are restored.

Post processing filters

Even if baked textures are very precise, they may need a bit of post processing to be perfect. To reach the maximum production quality, Total Baker comes with a specific set of realtime filters for each map type. For example, you can dilate the diffuse map to avoid background bleeding on edge seams, or slightly blur the AO map to remove noise. All these filters can drastically improve the final results in a few clicks, and they and are part of the baking workflow, so in most cases you won't need to use external apps to edit the generated textures.

Output

When you are satisfied by the result, you can save the generated textures to files. Depending on the settings, they are saved as PNG (8 bits per channel) or EXR (16 bits per channel, only height map). You can choose the destination folder and a base name, so you can easely organize your bakes.