FMP: Baking

 Here I'm just showing a hand full of the high polys that I made during the baking part of this finale vehicle. 

Initially I was baking using X-Normal. Because of this I was detaching small sections of the vehicle and working into these.

I then learnt how to bake in Substance Painter. Baking multiple object simultaneously is extremely simple when using substance. Because of this I began baking mulitiple sections of mesh at once.

Below are 3 examples of the grouping I was then baking. The only real limitation using this method is the poly count when creating the high polies in 3ds Max. The below meshes have extremely high tri counts.

I much prefered this method of baking. It's much more efficient. It's also better for design as you are now modeling in detail for multiple areas at once. 

This method does slightly alter the proces. As the geometry your baking now is allot more complex simply cutting out these areas manually before compositing in photoshop isn't really an option. This though is easily fixed by saving out the unwrap for the area your working on, and then using this to quickly fined the UV shells to then cut out.  This does now mean that you will have a file with many various UVW maps.

Another negative is that due to the poor export quality of Substance Painter exports the highest resolution map you could use is 2k. Substance painter will export at 4k but the actual quality of that export will be closer to 2k, this is why I wouldn't work at 4k with substance. X normal can export at any size so your not restricted in this way.