Using diffeomorphic, how to bake materials so I can export as FBX?
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I have diffeomorphic working, and can get my figure from Daz, and it looks and renders good. But I need to export as FBX now also, but I have heard that material shaders can't export, and have to bake the materials. Is there a way to do that directly in diffeomorphic plugin? Or another easy way?
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There are two ways. You can choose single principled as material method, that will export as fbx but simplify materials. Or you can bake the bsdf materials to textures, using the blender texture baking tools, this also allows you to remap uvs and simplify textures, other than getting better materials, but requires manual work.
There are lots of tutorials on texture baking in blender just follow a few.
Obviously I want to choose the first option. So I tried setting material method to "Single Principled" but then the materials do not show up in Blender in material preview view, and renderer. Any ideas?
The single principled has limits since it can only use a single principled node to be compatible with fbx. So for example shells can't work, as well as dual lobe or other advanced materials.
Yes this model at least uses a shell.
I'd like to necro this for what I hope is good purpose :-P. I was trying to use Simple Bake to bake the textures as PBR Bake, but it doesn't work because of the glossy & translucent shaders (which will only work w/ Cycles bake). Now, to me, this makes sense. Baking in glossy shaders is akin to baking in light in the scene, which I don't think we'd want on an exported model.
So, to refine the quesiton, I'm wondering what the best workflow in Diffeomorphic is to export baked PBR textures, such that lighting-related materials can be done in whatever they're being exported to, and therefore reflect the scene they are being rendered in.
Is selecting the Principled Only the equivalent of doing this?
No, the principled option just simplify materials to fit them to a single principled shader, it doesn't bake anything. As for the best procedure to bake, there's nothing specific to diffeomorphic the baking tools in blender work the same.
That makes sense, but what I'm asking is what the best setup is for the materials created by Diffeomorphic if your intention is a PBR bake (not considering the scene lighting). Because, if it's going to be exported to a game engine (Unreal in my case), then the lighting will be handled in the game engine shaders, so I would not want to bake the lighting of my Blender scene in--and that's essentially what will happen if using nodes like glossy/translucent, which are in the materials created by Diffeomorphic.
You get the best material conversion with the bsdf option, while principled will aproximate. As for baking you can choose which channels you want as usual with cycles so I'm not sure I understand your question. There's also lots of baking addons to simplify the process, always with channels to choose from. You can bake bsdf then use the textures on principled for example.
Mod edit: removed offsite commercial links.
So the question actually stemmed from me starting w/ Simple Bake. I chose PBR bake because I only wanted the correct colors/textures/etc..., not the lighting. If you try to use PBR Bake in Simple Bake on a DAZ figure imported through Diffeomorphic, it throws an error saying that PBR is not supported for the Glossy & Translucent nodes. I did a little reading, and to me, that made sense--if those nodes bake in lighting information, then it would not be correct when imported into a different engine/scene.
Maybe what you're saying as far as selecting the channels (maybe just "diffuse" for example) is really all there is to it, but I was curious because I would have thought Simple Bake would handle something that elementary automatically--but maybe not. Essentially, I'm wondering if there is a more accurate/faithful way to bake for an external engine than just selecting diffuse.
I tried removing those nodes or replacing them w/ Principled, but it goes sideways pretty quickly. I know you can use Cycles Bake, but presumably that's defeating the aforementioned purpose for the PBR bake.
I'm actually not too bent on this anyway... The downfall of Simple Bake here is that it always consolidates everything into a single material. That's not really useful on a character, since you'd want to have separate material settings for eyes, among other things--after you exported it.
But, it got me thinking about how the process "should" go, just in general, if Blender is not your final destination.