How to Bake Materials in Autodesk 3ds Max

This guide is part of the RapidPipeline 3D Plugin Actions Knowledge Base. It shows how to Bake Materials on Autodesk 3ds Max; if you'd like to know more about it, please check out the following links:

• Learn more about the Bake Materials
• Learn more about Autodesk 3ds Max

1. On the Menu Bar, click on RapidPipeline and choose Load Plug-in.
2. Select the model you want to optimize (if no selection is made, the whole scene will be processed).
3. Inside the Plugin window, choose the Action Bake Materials.
4. Press the Run button.

• Use the 3ds Max Plugin
• Select a part
• Run an Action
• Examine the results

This tutorial shows how use the RapidPipeline Processor Plugin in 3ds Max to simplify the shader graph complexity of a model´s materials by baking atlases. For more information see the 3ds Max Plugin Documentation. The Add-On runs on a powerful 3D data optimization and automation toolset, for more about this see the 3D Processor Reference.

The asset used in this tutorial (https://skfb.ly/6VnPP) by Belzar Sirus is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

The shoe input model and texture maps.

The shoe after the optimization, and the baked texture maps.

Here is a preview of the processing´s output: the input shoe (top) has 3 materials with 12 texture maps; and the output (bottom) has only 1 material with 3 texture maps.

2. Select the model you want to optimize (if no selection is made, the whole scene will be processed). 3. Inside the Plugin window, choose the Action Bake Materials. 4. Press the Run button.

Location of the UI in the Menu Bar.

The Decimate Mesh action opened in the Plugin.

To see the results with proper shading and the effect of the texture baking, enable “High Quality” from the Viewport Shading drop-down menu.

"High Quality” option in the Viewport Shading drop-down menu.

You can compare the materials and texture count of input and output by selecting each of them and opening the Material Editor (shortcut M). Then, open the Materials menu and Get from selected from the top bar.

"Get from Selected” option in the Material drop-down menu.

Materials and textures from the input model.

Materials and textures from the output model.

Learn more about our Decimate and Bake Atlas action!

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