Blender 2.8 - Baking thickness maps

In this video I show a simple way of baking thickness maps from high-poly onto low-poly geometry. Thickness maps are useful in many textures, as they mask out the areas on the model that have less volume. Typically I use them in character skin shading setups.
#b3d #eevee #texturing

[@wevertonealves]

Hey nice tutorial , but the ticknnes map normaly is used to control the radios , like what areas you more and what areas you have less sss , when you apply this in base color it works more like saturation color and not behave of sss , anyways in your looks good so that is what metters! Congrats

[@nano7586]

This video was so helpful to finally understand how this thickness/light transmittance is simulated. Thank you so much! Also, this sort of baking is so helpful for video game programming. Nice insight into some professional work here.

[@HappyDogRanchProductions]

Thank you so much for taking the time to share this. This a very helpful and useful map baking technique!

[@gnightrow4020]

I didn't realize thickness maps exist until now, I would Love to see more examples !

[@RicoCilliers]

Thickness maps are actually fairly widely used, especially in game engines or realtime engines like Eevee. Think of things like plants, wax candles, creatures, humans, etc. You can even use them on metallic objects, for example if you want some wear and tear and scratches, you can apply them using a thickness map. I'll see if I can make some more examples available.

[@danylbekhoucha6180]

You can watch Substance Painter tutorials they often bake this map.

[@IshBosamiya]

Nice!!! This map can be used to drive the subsurface scattering, as a mask for what parts there should be more subsurface scattering.

[@Tecboy08]

Wow @ first I was like, wtf is he doin? But I watched till the end, now I understand how to detail my models with translucency & the purpose of what baking is for. Thanks for sharing this!!! 👍

[@DavidVVvvhr]

amazing model

[@AZSDXC8954]

this video helped me out a lot

[@virginijasileikiene1989]

Really useful. Thanks!

[@malekmahadeen6259]

ty

[@cartoonfive]

Nice trick. Could come in handy when faking SSS in Fusion.

[@08wolfeyes]

Would it not be a better idea to name this an SSS ( Sub Surface Scattering ) map? If you name it something different to what others use then people might get confused. Great tututorial.

[@RicoCilliers]

I could, but I've noticed it's usually called a thickness map, in xNormal and SubstancePainter, as it's technically not only used for SSS effects,but for anything thickness related, so transparency, refraction, wear, damage, etc.

[@dzulrashdi6689]

Also know as single scatter map

[@luochuanyuewu]

Save my day. thanks!

[@Zammaany]

Interesting stuff

[@harrysanders818]

Thats a great model! A little bit of Anthony Hopkins in there ? :D:P

[@RicoCilliers]

thanks! I might have subconsciously added a bit of him in there. He's a phenomenal actor.

[@metalstaff]

Thanx!

[@sams_3d_stuff]

Aweosome

[@pheenix135]

Can I use this to make an alpha for feathers? I need to make a bird with a ruff around his neck 😅

[@NiranjanRaghu]

Oh, man, I've been looking for this for a really long time. Thanks a lot, dude! Gonna check if there's a way to cheat this in 2.79!

[@RicoCilliers]

No worries man. :) I believe you can do it in 2.79 by inverting the normals of the objects and baking an AO pass, but I haven't tried it

[@UncleBurrito15]

You should download the 2.79 experimental blender build and not the eevee one and you will get the same 2.79 but with many more spicy changes and fixes.

[@tedk6954]

Can you also bake down specular and gloss from procedural materials ?

[@RicoCilliers]

definitely, just use the same process I used here, just plug the nodes you want to bake into the emmission node like I did with the thickness node. You can bake pretty much any node this way :)

[@brandonkish3100]

Question: Can you explain how to do this for a mesh that has several different UV maps? I have a character that has a UV map for his head, then his torso, etc. Is there a way to bake each map separately? I would think you would have to use the full mesh even when baking the individual textures since some of the geometry from different areas can affect the results for a texture. Thank you for this. I have been having a hard time finding a way to generate a decent thickness map.

[@WARDISWARD]

shouldn't your low res mesh be a lil bit bigger (scaledd ) then you high res for baking ? There are obviously vertices of your high res. sticking through your low res mesh

[@RicoCilliers]

Not really necessary for organic characters, only in some cases and hard surface edges etc :) In this case, as long as the verts are reasonably close to the highpoly surface, blender casts a ray along each vertex normal in the direction of the highpoly mesh, even when the vertex is below the surface, provided the distance and bias settings are correct in the baking settings, problems do occur when the lowpoly mesh vertices are too far above or below from the highpoly surface, in such cases you will have clipping issues or distortion

[@ScifiSiShredaholic]

It's not inverting the AO, it's inverting the normals of the mesh... Also, looks like baking in 2.8 is borked at the moment :(

[@jamesprakashjc]

Nice.

[@eritumakafakafo3008]

is it possible to bake think hp on thick low poly model?

[@WindBendsSteel]

Is there a way to get the thickness in actual space units? Like millimeters for instance

[@RomboutVersluijs]

How is this better vs Subsurfscatter setting in the Princebled BSDF shader. Is this to have better control?

[@SupaKoopaTroopa64]

It's more useful in Cycles. If you use random walk SSS, and your sub surface radius is higher than the thickness of your mesh at that point, you will get discoloration artifacts. You should multiply your SSS radius by the depth map (maybe after running it through a map range node to map it between ~0.1 to 1) to avoid this.

[@Pr3DaToR15]

When i clikc "Inside" the mesh turns black.

[@knessing7681]

So is the thickness map reacting dynamically to the lighting (to different lighting conditions) ? or does it react to all lighting conditions the same way ?

[@RicoCilliers]

Its ultimately just a mask, so it can be used with any shader to react with light in many different ways. Commonly used to just tell the model where to put more or less SSS scattering.

[@blenderratt3692]

Thx for the tutorial. Would this work in 2.79?

[@RicoCilliers]

Unfortunately this particular method only works in 2.8, but there are other ways to do it in 2.79 perhaps you could search a bit there might be a tutorial out there...

[@blenderratt3692]

thx.

[@Lluc3D]

yes you can do it in 2.79, but you will need to download the development branch in blender downloads (last build for 2.79x series...)

[@WingmanArt]

Oh... I have seen you in the Fb group

[@premiero]

I guess it might be flipping faces normals

[@RicoCilliers]

True. I believe in 2.79 you had to do it manually, or bake in xNormal. Now we have it in a nice easy-to-use node.

[@oby1]

hehe- afrikaans

[@zackrobat]

Great video! It's nice to see these advanced topics covered by people who deeply understand the features and workflow. Constructive criticism: please don't grab windows and move them rapidly in circles. It's distracting and I can't see the thing you're moving while you move it. Likewise, please don't take the mouse and move it rapidly around in circles when you're not grabbing anything. All of those "rapid circling" motions take away from the clarity and enjoyability of the video. I understand that you want to bring the viewer's attention to the location of the mouse or the particular window you're talking about. But you should use a better technique. Perhaps configure your OS to make your mouse bigger. Or really, just don't do anything, but move the mouse to where you want the viewer's attention. We all know to follow the mouse with our eyes already, so you don't need to do anything else to direct our attention to it. Thanks for the great 2.8 video! Keep up the great work!

[@RicoCilliers]

glad you find it useful! and thanks for the critique. :)

[@RomboutVersluijs]

Still dont get why this baking is so terribly slow, i mean even with low samples 16 or so and render tiles set to same as image, its still kinda slow

[@RomboutVersluijs]

Kinda weird you select the emit node when there is no emit node in there?!

[@RomboutVersluijs]

Ow i thought it was mainly used to control the subsurfscatter more controlled. But this is also nice. So you can color thinner parts easier

[@maxo7798]

how did you bake high poly detail to low poly mesh ?

[@waltage]

it's not a thickness - it's inverted AO- report for misleading text

[@RicoCilliers]

heh. It's definitely not inverted AO. go ahead and bake one and invert it. then compare it to an AO map. you will see they are not the same.

[@waltage]

@@RicoCilliers just bake woman figure. lol

[@karamdeepsingh2367]

Good video but your accent is so damn hard to understand