Mesh Baker by Digital Opus [RELEASED]

Re: the "d3d11: buffer size can not be zero" using 2019.4.28f1. I will look into this issue.

It sounds like your other issue is resolved? Let me know if I misunderstand.

 

Yup both are resolved. Thanks.
I downgraded to 2019.4.20f1 instead and the issue is gone.
Thanks.

 

I have looked into the 2019.4.28+ skinned mesh error. This is also happening with 2019.4.29. It prevents almost all skinned mesh baking. I will push a fix up to the asset store over the next few days.

Thanks for reporting this.

 

Hi! I purchased this tool but I can't get animations working with multiple skinned mesh renderers. It does combine all characters into one skinned mesh renderer and the animations does play but the characters are stuck with static position (t- pose in this case). When I move that combined object under one of these characters the animation will play on that character. I did everything excatly like with this tutorial:

Thanks for help!

 

Hello,

Here are some things to check:

1) Errors in the console. Are you using 2019.4.28+ ? If so there is a bug that breaks baking skinned meshes. I pushed a new version up mid-week last week, make sure you are using the latest version.
2) If you move the bones on the source skeletons does the skinned mesh deform? If not then either the "Mesh Baker Settings is set to MeshRenderer" or "there was an error when baking, 'does the console say successfully baked XX meshes'?"
3) Check the culling settings on the source Animator components. Are they set to "Always Animate"?

Let me know if this fixes your problem.

 

Hi and thanks for the answer! My animator culling mode was set to Cull Update Transform, but when I switched it to Always Animate everything works fine!

Btw I also purchased Mesh Baker LOD and can you tell me why objects wont show in build? In editor everything works fine but in build all the objects are gone.

Thanks!

 

Glad to hear the culling settings are working. Re: objects not showing up in the build. That is a strange one. Are there any warnings or errors in the console while building?

Mesh Baker LOD does all its baking at runtime. Are there any errors in the device log? Are the meshes readable? Check the mesh stripping settings in the Player settings. Try setting these to Managed Stripping level "low", no vertex compression, don't optimize meshes. Let me know if this fixes the issue.

 

Hi,

I had some time.... yeah it took me a while.
My problem was that I instantiated the TMPs in the same frame I tried to bake them. I added a Coroutine to bake them and yield returned null before baking. That solved the problem. Maybe TMP has some Initialization to do...
Thank you for your help!

Kind Regards
Manuel

 

Hi! I'm considering buying this asset. Can I still use Unity's occlusion culling while using your asset?

 

Mesh Baker includes the Batch Prefab Baker. This will make duplicates of your prop prefabs that use a shared material. You can use these in your scene in place of your regular prop prefabs. Then enable static batching on those props to combine the meshes. Occlusion culling will work with static batches. Unity can hide (not render) occluded parts of the static-batch-combined-meshes.

If you do regular mesh combining it is hard to use occlusion culling. This may work for some games (eg. dungeon crawler, where you can combine all meshes in a room), but doesn't typically work well for open worlds.

 

Hi, just bought the asset - and has great hopes for it

I'm trying to combine 2 meshes (simple boxes) that have tiled materials, one for each.
I follow the tutorial on how to combine different material but the end result is a very low quality, distorted material for the combined mesh.

As you can see in the image, the 2 right meshes are the source and the 2 on the left (which is actually the combined mesh) are the result, which is distorted.

I get the warning "Texture T_Ground_Road_Path_2_BC_R has out of bounds UVs that effectively tile by (18.5, 13.3) tiling will be baked into a texture with maxSize:1024"
but I don't know what to do with it....
Help is much appreciated.

Thanks

 

Hello! I do not have populate prefab rows menu and I do no understand why. ?
I also can not see window replace prefabs
Did someone have same problem or knows what to do??

 

Textures with a lot of tiling like that will have the tiling baked into the combined material if you have the "Consider Mesh UVs" option checked. If the max atlas size is too small this can result in the resolution being bumped down leading to a blurry distorted result.

I would recommend either bumping up the maximum atlas size, or moving each material to its own submesh using the multiple materials option.

These tutorials should be able to help you out, let me know if that improves your results!

 

Hi! I'm currently integrating MeshBaker into our project and encountered some issues with baking materials into a combined material.

I haven't been able to pinpoint the exact cause and figured it should be faster If I ask here while I continue figuring it out as you may have already encountered it.

So the issue is when I try to bake my materials they only work if I use the Texture Packer Mesh Baker Texture Packer. Using Mesh Baker Texture Packer_Fast only output a material with a solid blue color as a texture resulting in my level becoming blue.

This seems to happen on both Runtime and Editor, and I even tried using the `MeshBakerEditorWindow` to bake the same set of materials.

As for the settings, I haven't really any setting in the `TextureBaker` component aside from the Texture Packer and I'm currently baking around 30 materials

I should mention that in my case, I have to use the Mesh Baker Texture Packer_Fast option as I would baking this on runtime before I load levels.

Thanks, and great work on the plugin btw!

 

This sounds odd. What is your version of unity, build target, and render pipeline?

 

Hi Phong.

I'm using Unity 2020.3.2f1, Mobile(Android/iOS) and using URP. If it's worth knowing, I'm using a custom shader made with shader graph, but I tried switching to URP/Lit as well to see if it was the cause but I got the same issue.

No errors in the logs as well when I bake.

 

I am having trouble reproducing the issue.

What version of the URP are you using?

I am using:

• Unity 2020.3.1f1
• URP 10.3.2
• Lit shader
• Build platform Android/Mobile
• Windows

When I bake the Examples:SceneBasic using the TexturePackerFast it works for me. Also when I bake Examples:SceneBakeTexturesAtRuntime which uses TextuPackerFast it also works at runtime. Both tests are in the editor. I have not tried on a device.

Can you think of anything in your project that could affect how render textures work?

Also you could try using "Texture Packer Fast V2 Beta". This texture packer was developed for HDRP pipeline which has a problem like the one you describe (atlases are blue). It uses different APIs to generate the atlas using the GPU. You could try that one. You will need to assign a render layer in the inspector that is not used for rendering other objects.

 

You've probably answered this question before... But there are 65 pages in this thread . Is there anything that would prevent this from being used in the DOTS workflow?

 

This is actually my first DOTS question.

Can you describe your workflow that you would like to implement?

Mesh Baker is all about optimizing props and scenes. These optimized scenes (Scene Objects with Mesh Renderers and Skinned Mesh Renderers) should be convertible to Entities using the Hybrid workflow. As I understand it, content for ECS is typically authored using Scenes with GameObjects and then converted to Entities. This should work.

If your Entities are being created procedurally at runtime you may be out of luck if you want to use Mesh Baker in that workflow.

The TextureBaker and MeshBaker components are just wrappers for pure C# implementations of the bakers. These bakers can be used without the compenents and should be callable from ECS code, but the API currently asks for a list of GameObjects as input. These are expected to have MeshRenderer's attached. Also the MeshBaker component creates a SceneObject with either a MeshRenderer or a SkinnedMeshRenderer component.

I would love to hear about how you would like to fit Mesh Baker into your workflow. I am very interested in supporting DOTS/ECS but could use some guidance regarding how people would like to use it.

 

Thanks! In my workflow I have a normal sub-scene that is full of game objects that have meshes and materials and they are converted whenever the sub-scene runs its conversion. I have a lot of buildings that are prefabs that the player places at runtime so ideally I would merge the textures and meshes for those prefabs ahead of time. Most of us DOTS guys tend to have similar setups. I don't use any skinned mesh renderers, but I know some of the other DOTS devs do. Personally, I don't foresee the need to have meshes or textures merged at runtime, but I can't speak for everyone in that regard. Since I'm not doing any procedurally created meshes... that means I don't need to use TextureBaker or MeshBaker's C# code at runtime right? From what I understand after watching the dice video on the asset store is that pressing the "Bake" button will create the new merged mesh, and then I can disable the old mesh. From then on, whenever the entity conversion happens at game-start, the new merged mesh will be used and everything will continue as normal.

I'm not sure about the SceneObject though.... not sure how that fits in or if it will be a problem.

 

If all baking happens in the editor then I don't forsee any problems. The scene objects, meshes & renderers that MeshBaker creates are just ordinary Unity objects and components. These should get Converted when the sub-scene is converted. You could even do all the baking in a separate scene and generate prefabs that are added to your sub-scene. Then Mesh Baker should not interfere with DOTS at all.

 

Perfect. I think it will work!

 

Updated Mesh Baker Tutorials available:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLCzm-udM-shncdtvrieqgi-hHDU1kt0d4

 

@Phong I am trying to follow Tutorial 8 Creating Customizable Skinned Mesh Characters

. Blender has changed immensely since that video has been made and it is virtually impossible to follow it. I seem to be struggling getting Blender to show the same as the video, there are like a gazzilion buttons and menus in Blender, how do you configure it to get the same visual layout as you have, like showing bones etc? What view mode are you in Layout, Modeling, Sculpting etc?

 

Hi Aggaton, this tutorial is very much overdue for a re-make. Unfortunately Blender underwent a MAJOR UI redesign with version 2.7. A lot of things were changed to make Blender more user friendly and industry standard. I don't think it is possible to make recent versions of Blender work like it does in this tutorial.

One option is to install an older version of Blender (pre-2.7). However you have probably done a lot of work with 2.8+ and I doubt you could open in an older version.

Another option is to get familiar with how Skinned Meshes work and are edited in Blender. Version 2.8 works similarly to older versions of Blender under the hood. It is mainly the UI that has changed. The operations I do in this tutorial are pretty basic/fundamental things so you will definitely be able to do them in 2.8. You will be doing everything in the "Modeling" layout. For you meshes you will be tabbing between "Edit Mode" and "Object Mode". For Armatures you will be working in "Edit Mode" and "Pose Mode"

There are many tutorials on Youtube like this one showing how to use Blender 2.8 to work with Armatures Bones and Meshes.

Sorry for the somewhat unsatisfactory answer.

 

Hi,
I downloaded Mesh Baker Free, I strictly followed the basic tutorials (video and in manual), but I can't get it to work on a simple example.

Example is a simple cube, two textures:



Texture baking executes without errors or warnings, atlas looks fine. I have checked shader (Unity's standard) is correctly set.



Then I go "Bake All Child Meshbakers", and here is the result:



There's obviously something I'm doing wrong, but I can't find what it is. Any ideas?

Edit: Im' using Unity 2021.1.18f1.

 

Hello, I think the problem is that the cubes use tiled UVs to tile the textures. You should be able to fix the issue by baking textures with "consider UVs" enabled, then re-bake the meshes.

These videos have more info on how to handle tiling.

 

Hello Phong! Thanks for the great asset! Need your assistance in this scenario to make a good workflow:
We use many levels (as prefabs) and in these levels we have other gameobjects as prefabs (characters, environment assets etc.. )
Level prefabs are dynamically loaded in runtime, so they don't live in a scene.

We can use Batch Prefab Baker to make the prefabs with combined material. But, in order to replace the prefabs that are used in levels, we have to manually assign meshes and materials. Each time we make a design change we need to repeat this tedious process. Is there any way that you can suggest to make this workflow easier?



Looking for something like "Replace Prefabs In Scene" tool, but it needs to work for the prefabs not on the scene and only replace mesh and material. May be we assign Source (prefab from project, used in levels) and Target (created by MB) and save their settings to use it later.

 

Hmmm,

I presume that the game-level-prefabs are nested prefabs like this?

• MyGameLevel (Top level prefab)
  • ...
  • PropPrefabInstanceA (nested prefab)
  • PropPrefabInstanceB (nested prefab)
  • ...

Could you do the following?:

• Have two versions of each PropPrefab:
  • PrefabStep0 Original using imported model meshes.
  • PrefabStep1 Baked prefab using Batch Prefab Baker meshes.
• Use the PrefabStep1 prefabs in your game-level-prefabs
• If any props change or you want to change what is in the atlas you just re-bake everything with the batch prefab baker. The level should auto-update for free.
• If you add a new prop to MyGameLevel that has not been baked, then:
  • Consider this prop's prefab to be NewPropPrefabStep1
  • Duplicated it in the project folder to create NewPropPrefabStep0
  • Assign these in the Batch Prefab Baker and bake. It will convert NewPropPrefabStep1 (used in GameLevel) to use the atlases.

 

Hello Phong,
Thank you for the reply. The process you suggested works.
Thanks a lot!

 

I've been using MeshBaker for years and I have a General question the best approach for combing many objects at the scene level. I'm working on porting my game from PC to Quest (it VR) and need to do a massive amount of optimization to make it work.

I am using additive loading for my levels and usually have around 5-8 senes loaded when a player enters a level.

I want to combine as many objects as possible in the most efficient way...I'm a solo dev so I mean efficient time wise. One note...to make it simpler. Its ok if I combine textures/prefabs for each level even if that means I have the same item in multiple texture atlases. Disk storage is not an issue for me.

Up until this point I've been using Mesh Baker to mostly combine textures and objects on a adhoc basis. I'd like to get more sweeping bakes to possibly bake a whole bunch of objects AND replace the meshes in the scene together.

I know my question is a bit generic....I'm trying to get a general sense of any tools in mesh baker that might help speed up the process...

Is it possible to do something like this? If so, what general steps should I take?

 

I would suggest using the Batch Prefab Baker to pre-prepare the props in your scenes so that as many as possible use shared materials. This workflow is fairly efficient for processing scenes full of many different props:

With lots of props in your scene already using a shared material then you have lots of combining options:

• Set the objects to static and let Unity's static batching combine them. This works with LODs and is very fast to set up.
• Use the Mesh Baker Grouper to quickly organize groups of objects and combine them. The performance for this is usually better than static batching. Also it can be done at runtime which improves scene size. A fast worflow is shown here:
• You can even combine them with Mesh.CombineMeshes and Unity's static batching utility.

 

Hello Phong!
I've been working with MeshBaker for a week trying to optimize a project in Unity 2020.3.17f1, and I've consistently run into one issue with Texture / Mesh bakers:
Some of the renderers I add to the list of Objectst To Be Combined will have their textures baked in the atlas correctly, but their mesh itself won't.
I can see the source gameobject in the "Objects to be combined" list, and it does get selected when I press "Select Objects in Scenes."
Whether I use "Bake All Child MeshBakers" (on the texture renderer) or "bake" (on the Mesh baker) those specific meshes never get baked.
If I bake the mesh and disable renderers on source objects, I see nothing where the problematic mesh was supposed to be. Other meshes bake just fine with the same baker.
It's not a shader issue: they have the Standard shader and sometimes even share a material with some of the baked objects from that specific baker.
It's not really a mesh issue either, since some of those meshes are duplicates of objects that get baked just fine.
It happens consistently for the few affected gameobjects though.

Any idea or pointer would be welcome!

 

This is odd. Are there any warnings or errors in the console?
I would suggest debugging the problem by creating a child MeshBaker of the texture baker and adding only one of the invisible objects to the list of objects to be combined (deselect 'Objects To Be Combined' Same As Texture Baker'). Then:

• Set the log level on the Mesh Baker to debug
• Clear the console
• Press Bake

Check the console: You should see messages about triangles and verts being added. And it should end with a message "Successfully baked 1 meshes ...". You should be able to select the "Combined Mesh Object" in the scene. When you do this the mesh should be highlighted. You can turn the scene render mode to "Shaded Wireframe" and you should be able to see the triangles. This should tell you if the mesh was baked correctly. You can try adding different test materials to see if anything renders. You an also try Bake Into Prefab which should save the mesh as an asset in the project. Does this mesh render in the preview?

Could this be an issue with transparency and/or multiple materials? Or perhaps missing channels that the shader expects? Another possibility is inverted normals, (does the object have negative scaling?)

 

Thank you for your help!
I think the problem was that the final mesh was going over the max amount of vertices. Splitting the objects in two mesh bakers solved the issue.

 

Hi, In my scene I'm getting too many textures loaded at once (more than 2000), using mesh baker would help me to reduce it? Or at least reduce the memory space?

 

That is a lot of textures. Mesh Baker should be able to help reduce the number, by combining them, but the overall memory footprint will be about the same, possibly larger if tiling gets baked into the combined textures. How big are the textures?

 

A lot of them are 4k, 2k and the others are 1k. I can't even bake lights without burning my GPU.

Here is a snapshot with memory profiler I just took:



I try reducing some 4k texture to 2k and it gave me some results of course but it is still a lot:

 

Yikes that is 10 Gigs of textures in a single scene.Most GPUs don't have that much memory so the textures will need to be swapped in and out of GPU memory every frame.

IMO you need to reduce this to less than 2-3. Can you use the same textures in more places? Or re-use the same prop more times?

 

Hmm do you mean GPU instancing?
I thought Unity handled texturing sharing automatically...

 

The texture sharing is handled automatically but it might be necessary for Unity to do some non-performant things. If a GPU in a PC only has 4 Gigs of ram, then the 10 gigs of textures needs to be split between GPU ram and CPU ram. To render the textures, the textures need to be copied in batches from CPU ram to GPU ram. That can take some time when you are talking about several gigs of textures. If you have less than 4 gigs of textures then most GPUs can hold everything into GPU ram and the GPU ram never needs to be reloaded.

 

Alright, I get your point. Just don't know how to achieve that. I've been looking into virtual texturing, mipmap streaming but can't get smaller memory usage with those tools. The only solution I'm seeing is to reduce the resolution which sucks not having 4k or 2k textures in my scene. Or you meant with your last sentence textures atlases?

 

I am interested in this item, I have about tens of thousands of squares, each with a different color and gradient, is it possible to support it?

 

Probably, I presume the 10,000+ squares are individual meshes and you want to create a shared material and combine them? I also presume your materials are using color tints?

Mesh Baker has a feature called "Blend Non-Texture Properties". It will blend the color tints into an atlas texture. Here is a video explaining how it works.

 

Hi

Looking into possibly using this asset. But first:

Can I use it with raytracing and/or pathtracing?

We're mainly using 2021.2 HDRP 12.1 with raytracing for non game offline rendering. Can this asset help in any way, considering that raytracing does not support "Graphics.DrawMesh"?

 

You could use it with raytracing & pathtracing, Mesh Baker creates ordinary meshes that are rendered using ordinary Unity components, but I am not sure there would be much benefit in your case.

The main benefit of using Mesh Baker is "draw call optimization". The main users of Mesh Baker are mobile and VR developers who are trying to squeeze the most out of every frame on low end rendering hardware. Setpass/Drawcalls are a big bottlneck.

Are Setpass-calls/Draw-calls/Batches a bottleneck for you? If so then Mesh Baker could help Otherwise there is probably not much benefit.

 

hi, i use diffrent optimization tools but was not happy with all, so i tried mesh baker.
i followed the tutorial and tried to opzimize my scene.

the results was bad.
original scene (its a top down game, only static objects in there)
7500 drawcalls
1mil verts

after baking parent object with all scene objects the result was

6000 draw calls
12mil verts.

so verts was *12 and drawcalls reduced only around 10%

so any idea?

 

Do you know why you have so many drawcalls? If there are a lot of different object using different materials then Mesh Baker should help a lot. However that may not be the cause of the high drawcalls. Are you using a lot of lights? What pipeline and shaders are you using? What is the platform?

The Window -> Frame debugger is a great tool for discovering where drawcalls are coming from.

If you give me more information I can give you a better answer.

 

There is a strange bug where objects with multiple materials cause textures to Flicker on the Oculus Quest 1 & 2. This only with objects with multiple materials; One material objects do not flicker. If I can convert a multi-material object to a single material object I should eliminate the flicker. Can Meshbaker convert a multi-material object to a single material object? Is there anyway to do it?

 

Hey I bought MeshBaker and have two questions (feel free to redirect me to the docs as I didn't read all of it yet):
1. Combining my model with lots of sub models I get the error
"Object XXX (UnityEngine.GameObject) has a MeshRenderer but no MeshFilter."
This is a TextMesh with a MeshRenderer. So why doesn't MeshBaker combine it, or maybe more important: why does it stop the combining process and not just copy this GameObject and continue combining?
2. I am using TextureArrays on my model and on first try it didn't seem to handle it correctly. Is MeshBaker able to handle TextureArrays?
Thanks!