STEP BY STEP BAKE MAPS IN NOMAD SCULPT
01 MODEL AND PAINT
Sculpt and model your creature or character however you’d normally do it. Keep elements in parts, for example here I have the head, horns, teeth, gums, eyes and hair all as separate models to make it easier for the UV process, texturing and creating materials. Painting with vertex paint is fine as this will be captured onto a UV map at a later stage.
02 REDUCE THE MESH AND UV
Duplicate the head and keep it in the same place, but hide one copy. There is a new plugin called Quadremesher that will be released with Nomad Sculpt 1.85 any day now. If you have access, use it to make a lower-polygon model with accurate topology. If not, just use the built-in Quad Remesher that comes with Nomad. It's not as good but will do for this test. Once you have your low-polygon model, go to the Geometry tab and down to Miscellaneous, where you can use the UV Unwrap option.
03 REPROJECT HIGH TO LOW
Now we need to get the highresolution data off the high-res model and onto the low-res version. Hide all the other models and just have the two heads visible. Subdivide the low-poly head several times to give it lots of geometry. Now go to Geometry>miscellaneous, and under 'Reproject-vertex' set the 'From high res' option. This will project that highresolution data onto the low-poly model.
04 FINAL BAKE
In the same panel as Reproject you can use the 'Bake-textures' options, but first make sure you switch on all the textures you want to bake and set the size; personally, I like to use 2K or higher. If you then head over to the Materials tab you’ll see that it has created all the necessary maps for you. You can now use the Export function to save versions of all the maps out as either GLTF or OBJ files, which can then be used in other programs such as Sketchfab, as I’ve shown here.