Baking for the Game Assets

What the talk is about

Maksym Makovskyi covers baking normal maps for game assets from a whole-pipeline view. He advises building high-poly so bevels and details actually bake: add a slope on cuts, leave no holes, and skip tiny geometry that is better applied in Substance Painter. He explains shading and tangent space: packages treat soft and hard edges differently, so the model should be triangulated before export and tangents and bitangents kept in sync across tools and engines. He compares baking in Substance, Marmoset and Maya: Maya gives the cleanest hard edges thanks to its padding algorithm, but is much slower. He recommends baking at 32 bits with dithering, blending averaged and surface-normal bakes, and baking AO and Color ID separately with the right settings, plus correct import options in Unreal, Unity and Lumberyard. Useful for 3D artists preparing PBR assets.