Mesh Baker by Digital Opus [RELEASED]

Can i bake textures without meshes?
If i can't how to make multi meshes like materials set difference groups not depend on max verts?
Like (Vest , Hair , Pants, etc...)

 

You can bake textures into an atlas, then create meshes that use the atlas, but not combine them. The easiest way to do this is to use the Batch Prefab Baker.

Youtube tutorial video:

I don't understand your second question.

 

no. what i do is. for a animated spectator crowd for a football stadium. First I create a texturebaker multimeshbaker object I select all the characters. combined materials into an altas, after that I click bake into scene it produces a CombinedMesh-Multimeshbaker. everything is fine. i disable renderer on the multimesh baker. i play it. everything is peachy keen. then i go to create a prefab (e.g. spectators) I go to gameobject tab create empty game object. i drag and drop it to my prefab into the window. set to bake into prefab. after that it deletes my combinedmesh-multimeshbaker object and puts the spectators instance from the prefab i picked in my project up into the scene. thoughts on what to do next?

 

How do I make use TexturePackerHorizontal and TexturePackerVertical? Is it available in any of the components or just the API?

 

You can select these texture packers in the MB3_TextureBaker inspector. There is a dropdown where you can choose which texture packer to use. I just noticed that the label for this field is 'Unitys Pack Textures'. This label is a bug, it should read 'Texture Packer' will fix this with next release.

 

Ok, thanks

 

I am having an issue with using the MultiMeshBaker at runtime. I started with the Free version of Mesh Baker and was able to use it successfully to create a combined mesh at runtime that I can add and delete the component objects. And the texture baker worked great also.

So then I purchased the full version because I am planning on using materials other than the diffuse shader. It still worked with MeshBaker.

As soon as I added more components and got my vertices count up above 64K, I switched the MeshBaker out for a MulitMeshBaker.
At design time, I can use it to bake a combined mesh. But when I use the dynamic AddDelete function, it always fails. If I bake the mesh at design time, it fails on the first attempt to remove an object, if I try to bake the mesh at runtime, without baking it at design time, it fails.

I get the following error:
textureBakeResults must be set.
UnityEngine.Debug:LogError(Object)
DigitalOpus.MB.Core.MB3_MeshCombinerSingle:BuildSceneHierarchPreBake(MB3_MeshCombinerSingle, GameObject, Mesh, Boolean, GameObject[]) (at Assets/MeshBaker/scripts/core/MB3_MeshCombinerSimple.cs:2633)
DigitalOpus.MB.Core.MB3_MeshCombinerSingle:BuildSceneMeshObject(GameObject[], Boolean) (at Assets/MeshBaker/scripts/core/MB3_MeshCombinerSimple.cs:2829)
DigitalOpus.MB.Core.MB3_MultiMeshCombiner:_bakeStep1(GameObject[], Int32[], Boolean) (at Assets/MeshBaker/scripts/core/MB3_MultiMeshCombiner.cs:412)
DigitalOpus.MB.Core.MB3_MultiMeshCombiner:AddDeleteGameObjectsByID(GameObject[], Int32[], Boolean) (at Assets/MeshBaker/scripts/core/MB3_MultiMeshCombiner.cs:303)
DigitalOpus.MB.Core.MB3_MultiMeshCombiner:AddDeleteGameObjects(GameObject[], GameObject[], Boolean) (at Assets/MeshBaker/scripts/core/MB3_MultiMeshCombiner.cs:279)
MB3_MultiMeshBaker:AddDeleteGameObjects(GameObject[], GameObject[], Boolean) (at Assets/MeshBaker/scripts/MB3_MultiMeshBaker.cs:37)
FloorOptMVP:Start() (at Assets/Resources/OptimizedFloor/FloorOptMVP.cs:84)

I am certain that the TextureBakeResults is set. At least it is set in the editor for the MultiMeshBaker component. And if I manually trigger a Bake in the editor it works fine. It just gives me this error at runtime. And if I cut out some objects and switch to MeshBaker, it works fine.

Any thoughts on why it is not getting the TextureBakeResults and throwing this error at runtime with MultiMeshBaker?

Thanks, and thanks for a great tool.
-mat

 

An update to my own question...

I worked around this problem by having two MeshBakers each getting half of the objects so I didn't use the MultiMeshBaker. And this worked great at runtime.

But when looking at the two meshes, they did not add up to having more than 64K vertices. It is possible that I had made a mistake when I tried to add objects and it said that I had more than 64K vertices, probably by adding the objects more than once at runtime.
In that case I never needed the MultiMeshBaker, but I am still not sure why it did not work at runtime.

Does it need to have more vertices than the number put into the max vertices per mesh parameter?
In other words, can MultiMeshBaker work at runtime if it is only creating a single mesh?
And the error is still a mystery since I had definitely defined the texture bake results variable.

 

Yes, the MultiMeshBaker will work with fewer than max vertices in the mesh.

Hi Mlaiebow, I just tried a test and was not able to reproduce the issue as I understand it with a variety of setups. Here is what I did:

• Added an MB3_MultiMeshBaker component to an empty game object. There was never an MB3_TextureBaker in this setup.
• Added three objects with different materials to the MultiMeshBaker
• Baked without setting a texture baker result. It baked successfully with each material mapped to a separate submesh.
• I also tried with setting a texture bake result (still not texture baker). It also successfully baked.
• I also tried with a TextureBaker (TextureBakeResult and objects added to texture baker) and it worked in that case as well.

All of the the bakes used a script at runtime.

I did have some issues at one point with previous baked data messing with the MultiMeshBaker. I think I fixed those issues but it possible I missed something. You might want to try with a clean MultiMeshBaker component.

Is your setup different than described here?

[Edit] I had another thought last night. Was this the first error in the console? The MultiMeshBaker component is a wrapper for a MultiMeshCombiner component. It is possible that there was an earlier error and the TextureBakeResult was never assigned from the Baker to the Combiner.

 

My setup is the same as what you have listed.
I started a clean project with what looks in the editor like the same setup as my other project, and it works great.
But the other project still gives me that error.
It seems like there is some not fully formed multimeshbaker result somewhere in the project and when I run the AddDelete/Update it is trying to create a new baked multimesh without using the settings from the component and resulting in the missing texture bake results error.
That is just a guess, I have searched all over for something like that. It would also explain why when I use MeshBaker it said that I was over 64K when I was not.
I also switched from the Free version to the Paid version amidst this.

In any case, deleting and recreating/reimporting a large chunk of the project and adding a new meshbaker component and it is working again.
I wish I could figure out exactly what happened, but it just looked like there was something created at runtime either every time or once and was persistent, that was interfering with subsequent runs.

Thanks!
I have successfully used Mesh Baker to reduce my draw calls by like 2000x, great work, thanks!

 

Heyo!,

First of all, love the program. My company and I are trying it out to see how it fits into our pipeline. One thing we're noticing is a lot of artifacting after we bake light maps to combined meshes. It has artifacting if I do a single mesh bake, or a multi mesh bake. I checked the unity layed out UVs and they look fine but i'm getting black and white splotches all over the baked mesh.

I even tried all the different methods of baking the combined mesh material atlas even though the object i'm baking uses only one material and still get these artifacts. To me, it looks like the artifacts that one gets if they import an FBX without checking the box "generate UVs for lightmaps". Since the meshes aren't stored in the project like that I assume i'm missing a setting that tells unity to do this?


interested in your thoughts. Please let me know if I can give more info to help out Cheers

 

Hey @Phong, any news on the 32Bit mesh index buffer update for 2017.3?
I have a presentation of our project next week and want to bake 11M polys, but maybe it's wise to wait?

 

Check that the generated mesh has a UV2 channel. If you want to lightmap the combined mesh I would recommend using one of these settings (on the MeshBaker inspector).

• 'Lightmap UVs' => generate new UV2 layout
• 'Lightmap UVs' => copy UV2 to separate rects

Also, you may want to add some padding when generating the lightmap UVs. In the lighting window you should be able to see the UV2 layout overlayed on the lightmap if you select the combined mesh object. If you zoom in you may be able to see lightmap pixels that span the gap between UV islands. This can cause the strange blotching you describe.

 

I am hoping to release a version that will support this later this week, however it generally takes Unity a few days to review it so it probably won't be live until Next week. I will take a look at the code changes necessary to support this and post them here if they are reasonably easy.

 

Hi

I´m having this texture errors:



I´m doing exactly the same thing I always did and used to work...any idea?

 

Hmm, never mind, just the same thing on my notebook and it worked...

It´s something with my PC...



Gonna reinstall unity

Thanks anyway...

 

I don't know HOW I missed "Generate new UV2 Layout" but that worked! Thanks so much! This will be a very fun tool utilize in the rest of our game now

 

HI!

I´m still having a problem generating an atlas that can be shared by different levels AND, also not having to remake the entire atlas every time I add a new level to the game which make me lose a lot of information I add to the level, so, using the batch prefab maker is not working.

I was checking how MeshBaker works: It selects the vedry first object of the scene and select it´s materiasl, than move to the other objects and select any unique materials it can possibly find.

To make use of this I created an object named "Texture Catalogue" and inserted in it every possible texture I was going to need in the atlas.

The problem is, it stubbornly does not assume this object to be the first one

So, what defines the first one? It´s not random, every time I try it´s the same order, but it does not appear to follow any criteria

 

Hi pojoih,

Bad news I am afraid. The Unity Mesh API seems to be broken for meshes larger than 64k. I cannot successfully write mesh data when there are more than 64k vertices. The generated mesh is screwed up. I wrote a very simple script that copies data from a large mesh to a new mesh but it doesn't work if the source mesh has more than 64k. I have filed a bug report with Unity. Until this is fixed Mesh Baker won't be able to do anything with Meshes larger than 64k

[UPDATE] Hi Pojoih,
Good news. Unity support got back to me and pointed out the indexFormat flag in the API that needs to be set to 32 in order to get large meshes to work. I have a build with large meshes working now. If you want the changes right away email me or PM me. I plan to push up a new version with this Monday, should be available mid week.

 

Hi lzardo,

There should be no problem re-using an atlas generated in one scene and using it in another scene. I use this functionality frequently. I also do not understand why you need the Texture Catalouge? If Mesh Baker visits all the objects, won't it find all the materials?

 

Hi, thanks for answering...

Yes, it does, but it changes the order in which the atlas is created.

What I´m trying with the catalogue is to make sure that every time the atlas is created the textures are placed in the exact same places, that´s what I need that catalogue for, but I need it to be the first object to be used every time so the order in which the textures are read are always the same.

I got it by sorting the objects in the Y axis.

I just didn´t have time to see if it works, I´ll try it tonight.

But, id´like to know how you do this, if possible, perhaps (probably) it´s smarter than my solution

thanks

 

Hmmm, so the objective is to get the textures in the same place in the atlas regardless of order in which they are added to the TextureBaker. Be aware that if anything changes, bake settings, a texture size, a new texture/material is added then things will move around in the atlas because the texture packer will pack differently.

I would think that the best approach would be to sort the distinctMaterialTextures at the end of function __Step1_CollectDistinctMatTexturesAndUsedObjects. But sort on what criteria? Perhaps texture names and sizes? I will give it some thought.

I am still wondering if this is the best approach. It sounds like, when you create a new level, you are adding new objects with new materials and want to bake these into the atlases? Is this correct. If so then fiddling with the order of objects will not ensure that rectangles in the atlas are in the same place as before. If a new material has been added then the texture packer will generate a completely new packing.

I would think the best workflow would be the Batch Prefab Baker. Use the output meshes from the batch prefab baker in the prefabs you are using in your levels. If you add or remove new prefabs to any of your levels then add and remove them from the Batch Prefab Baker and re-run it.

 

I added a few placeholder textures so, I expect it´ll keep the placement in future atlases if I keep the same texture size as you reminded me...

The problem with simply using Batch Prefab Baker, which was what I was using so far and is a great solution is that it loses a lot of information that I want my prefabs to keep, so, every time I needed to add a new texture to the mix I had to redo everything.

For example, my levels are space levels, I want some asteroids to rotate randomly and the space station modules to rotate along their axis, for this, every time I needed to modify it´s static flags and add scripts, not the optimal solution.

 

And, another thing, I finally found out what was causing meshbaker to cause the texture displacement and distortions (as seen in the image I uploaded above)

It has something to do with this error and I believe it´s something related to the objects geometry, but not exactly what:

Any idea?

 

Hmmm, I wrote a script that I have not released yet that crawls through the scene finding prefabs that match the source prefabs in a batch prefab baker. When found it switches the mesh and material only with the correct one from the batch prefab baker. It doesn't replace the prefab with the generated one. If you want I could send you that script.

This leaves in scene modifications to prefabs untouched. The downside is if you ever "Apply" a prefab in a scene that has had this done then your source prefab has its meshes replaced. Fairly easy to fix but it can be confusing.

 

again...

after the error I described above, Mash Baker (or Unity) gets corrupted and from then on any object I try to bake does not work anymore:



Now, my notebook is having the same problem I was having with my desktop...

 

I have just uploaded a new version to the asset store which fixes a rare issue causing UVs not to be adjusted properly. It is likely that this is that issue. It should be live in a few days.

 

Curious about a feature and how it works.

If I combine meshes and use the “Bake in SceneObject” option does it get COMPLETELY removed if I delete the gameobject it’s part of?

Also, if I re-bake and save over it multiple times...do the old ones get removed?

I just want to make sure I’m not creating an issue where performance starts to degrade because I’m using that feature too much.

I use it a lot because it saves me a lot of time, as I don’t always need to create prefabs for items baked.

 

Thanks!

I already fixed it, somehow the offset values in some of the materials changed, it was simple to solve, escpet that it cost me a few days to figure it out, hehehehe

Thanks a lot

 

The mesh is still in the there. You can see it in the Mesh Baker inspector at the bottom. There is a field Mesh and an integer number which is the InstanceID of the mesh. Mesh Baker will re-use this mesh for each bake so it overwrites any old values. You can re-bake a lot. Mesh Baker LOD does this. re-bakes several times a second and can run for hours.

If you set the Mesh field to none then the Mesh will become orphaned. In the editor Unity will detect these and you will see a message in the inspector "Cleaning up 1 leaked meshes". In a game I don't think Unity tries to detect leaked objects so I wouldn't do this. You can tell Mesh Baker to destroy the mesh with MyMeshBakerObj.meshCombiner.DestroyMesh().

There should be no problem using it as much as you want.

 

Thanks a bunch. Will try the new Update when it's on the Asset store. Just found out that the progressive lightmapper has the same problem with setting the index buffer when exporting the meshes for baking, resulting in incorrect lightmaps with big black polygons over the whole texture . So further optimizing has to wait.

 

Create/Other does not exist in my Unity editor (2017.3.0f3)
do I need to move some mesh baker to an Editor folder or something?
how can I get started? sorry for the obvious newbie question...
thanks for any help you can give,

 

Hi Ben, are there any errors in the console when you import Mesh Baker. The menu should be under:

• GameObject
  • Create Other
    • Mesh Baker

If this menu is not there you can still use the components if Mesh Baker imported and there were no compile errors. All the menu items do is provide a convenient way one step option. You can create a game object with a child game object and put these components on:

• MB3_TextureBaker, MB3_MeshBakerGrouper
  • MB3_MeshBaker or MB3_MultiMeshBaker

A batch prefab baker is just:

• MB3_TextureBaker, MB3_MeshBaker, MB3_BatchPrefabBaker

 

I'm on Android using the Mobile/Unlit (lightmapped) shader for my materials. I want to take some static lightmapped objects I created in a staging scene and turn them into a mesh-combined prefab that I can deploy in various locations at runtime in a different scene, but I want them to retain their lightmapping. Does Mesh Baker support this? I thought it did, but in testing the generated prefab it loses its lightmapping.

Just bought Mesh Baker and spent some time going through documentation, videos, and this forum. Have not seen this answered.
Thx!

 

hi, i used mesh baker to made a prefab and dynamic created
and i set bounds to big size like vector3(512,0,512)
but sometime still cant see it in scene

 

This used to work in Mesh Baker 4 with Beast lightmapping, but is not possible with enlighten unfortunately. You will need to re bake the static lightmaps. Make sure that when you generate the combined mesh you use one of these lightmaping UVs options:

• Generate new UV2 layout
• Copy UV2 unchanged to separate rects

 

It is very likely the bounds, but it could be that the bones of the skinned mesh got moved somewhere off screen. Did you really use the 0 for the y or is that a typo?

When the mesh disappears can you pause the editor, select the skinned mesh renderer object. You should be able to see the bounds in the scene (wireframe). If you also select the camera you should also be able to see the view fustrum for the camera and check if these intersect. If it is not that, could it be that the bones are being transported off camera somewhere? Select the bones of the skinned mesh to see where they are.

 

Thanks, Phong. Is this is also true for the new Progressive lightmapper?

The key point here is that even when using the generate/copy UV2 options in Mesh Baker, that information is lost when you make the lightmapped game object into a prefab. So

1. create mesh combined object
2. lightmap the object
3. make the object into a prefab
4. copy the prefab into a scene

loses the lightmaping info.

 

Ahhh, you want the lightmapping stored with the a prefab and use it in a different scene. This is a different problem. I thought you wanted to lightmap source objects, then bake and wanted to re-use the lightmaps. That won't work.

However what you want to do can be made to work. This is not an issue specific to Mesh Baker meshes. It is a challenge with any mesh in Unity. There is a thread here explaining how to do this with Enlighten. There are some scripts you need to use to do this.

https://forum.unity.com/threads/problems-with-instantiating-baked-prefabs.324514/

 

Cool. Thanks for the pointer!

 

Hi! Is there any chance this asset will be updated to remove all the warnings from 2017.3 and up? It's kind of annoying to have so many of these cluttering up my logs .

 

I will try to clean these up.

 

Can it be use for combining different materials on same mesh ?

for example I have a tire which has 2 materials on it, how I could make it use just one material ?

 

Yes, this is very easy. Just add the object to a Texture Baker and follow the normal procedure for combining materials. The textures for both materials will be combined into an atlas. When you bake the meshes, the two submeshes will be combined into a single submesh.

 

Thanx for Quick Reply !!

I have a car each of its tires are causing two dawcalls
1- 1 for shadow
2- actual draw

means 8 draw calls.

Please suggest can I use Mesh backer to reduce these draw calls and how ..?

 

Hello
I dont own Mesh Backer just jet.(I will need it at the end anyway when I settle my things litle bit down...)
Q: But meanwhile, currently Im getting rid of lot of necessary faces (especially within objects) and combine them thru shortest path and so on... for a single objects (high poly objects), so how dose this asset deal with that ? Should I only clean faces within of the objects or is this also necessary ? Am I actually wasting my time ?
Thx

 

You could combine the shadow and tire if they are using reasonably similar shaders. It is likely though that the shadow is using an unlit or alpha blended shader which will make it hard to combine. What about combining the four shadows together, do they move or are they fixed? Even if they move, you could combine the four shadows into a SkinnedMesh, I expect they are very low poly so the skinning would not be very expensive. This playlist has videos showing how to do various kinds of baking:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCzm-udM-shlRUy5f9QHHxqqv-9wP5FBM

 

I presume that your are combining meshes and when you do this some triangles are hidden within the objects and you would like to remove these. Sadly Mesh Baker does not do this, and I don't know of any asset that does. I would think that this is a task best handled in a Modeler. I know Blender as a "Select Interior Faces" function that I would think would make it easy to find and remove interior faces.

 

Hi. I've got lots of skinned mesh monsters in my game, currently only one type, different scales (not a must), I'm hoping to combine in runtime as they're creating a lot of drawcalls. I wasn't sure which video was best for that. My game is fully procedural so they come and go as the player moves around, activate deactivate as the player gets closer, and use navmesh agent AI, seperate animator controllers, etc. Is any of that a problem? I wasn't sure which video to watch for runtime batching.

Also I was curious if there was any way to get this working with LODs? Currently each is 3,700 tris, with no LODs, I was thinking a good first step would be to set up an LOD or two.

Separate from that. There is procedural building in my game as well. Would it be difficult to join a structure of say 100 pieces, but still be able to remove a piece if the player deconstructs it in runtime? Just a combine, turn off all the old renderers, and recombine as necessary sort of workflow? Thank you!