BA3 - Baking Software

Because this brief involves a lot of baking I figured I'd make a comparison between the different software's to see which one will fit my needs the most. The different software I choose to test was 3dsMax, xNormals and Maya. There are many more baking tools out there but there 3 are the most common I know about. To test this I will do a test bake of the door from my Medieval doorway I created for my first study.

To start off with I will show a picture showing a bake from the 3 software's to later compare them and write both pro's and con's. I set all the software to 256 rays and decided to render 4k textures because this is just for comparison purposes. All bakes have AO and Normal maps applied and comes straight from the oven (baking process) without any editing.

Autodesk Maya:

As we can see, this bake show lots of detail and did a very good job with the baking. How ever, it did not capture all the normal data very well as you can see on the nails. Compared to the rest here the nails looks very flat compared to the other ones where you can see some of the detailed shapes I had given them. It also created a not so realistic black shading around all of the objects which looks pretty but is not very realistic and gives it a bit of cartoony feel.

3dsMax: 

This bake came our very flat and weak. It did a very good job with the normal map by capturing all the information from the high poly but the AO came out very low. I believe with some photoshop editing this one would be good but compared to the rest this one was the worst one, AO wise. I believe with some adjusting to the settings it would look different but I wanted to compare them all with just simply adding the rays amount and nothing more.

xNormal:

xNormal did a very good job in both areas, it was also the quickest out of the 3. It did capture all the normal map data well and also did a pretty good job with the AO. It didn't overdo the AO like Maya did but maybe it could capture a little bit more. Especially with the nails.

Result:

The software I will use for the future is xNormal. It is not very shocking because how this tool is one of the industry favourites. It is a separate software but the time you save when baking with good results is worth it. After all, time is very important in this industry. It did not capture the AO as well as Maya did but with some photoshop editing they always comes out very well.