Baking multiple high poly meshes to single low poly mesh

[ashyankee]

I have created a complex robot model with around 60 parts. All high poly pieces. Im making low resolutions versions of these pieces. If I bake them as it is, I'll have 60 different meshes with 60 sets of textures. I want to combine these ideally to import into unreal. How do I go about doing this in 3d coat? I'm not able to find any video discussing this. 

[AbnRanger]

3 hours ago, ashyankee said:

I have created a complex robot model with around 60 parts. All high poly pieces. Im making low resolutions versions of these pieces. If I bake them as it is, I'll have 60 different meshes with 60 sets of textures. I want to combine these ideally to import into unreal. How do I go about doing this in 3d coat? I'm not able to find any video discussing this. 

Assuming you modeled it in the Sculpt Workspace, it's not going to deliver good baking (going from many parts to one mesh) results if you have a lot of overhanging or intersecting parts, but if you don't have those issues to deal with, you could Retopo everything on one mesh (POLY GROUP) layer > Create UV's or choose Auto UV layout when going through the Baking process (BAKE menu > Bake to PPP with Normal Maps is the most common option).

It really depends on whether or not you plan to use Auto Retopo or use manual retopo tools. If Auto-Retopo, you could create a Blank SCULPT TREE layer and with that selected > RMB and choose MERGE VISIBLE. 3DCoat will merge a copy of all parts into one. All the other Sculpt Tree layers will be undisturbed, so you can now hide them if needed. With the new Merged layer made, you can RMB and choose AUTO-RETOPO. Picking the right number of polygons is very important. Oftentimes users will make the mistake of trying to generate an uber low poly version for game engines and that is not what 3DCoat...nor any other Auto-Retopo toolset in any app...will generate. They are typically evenly spaced quads...not game engine optimized topology. So, don't try to force that on the Auto-Retopo engine in 3DCoat. If won't give you good results. Test different polycounts until you get a clean overall result. Later, you can go back with the DELETE FACES/EDGES tool (holding down the CTRL key for deleting entire Edgeloops), to optimize the topology for export to a game engine.

[Dmitriy Nos]

2 hours ago, ashyankee said:

I have created a complex robot model with around 60 parts. All high poly pieces. Im making low resolutions versions of these pieces. If I bake them as it is, I'll have 60 different meshes with 60 sets of textures. I want to combine these ideally to import into unreal. How do I go about doing this in 3d coat? I'm not able to find any video discussing this. 

Do you have a sculpt mesh with many sculpt layers? Now you want to create a single low poly mesh on top of your sculpture?

[Carlosan]

What type of robot is it? Hard surface, organic, hybrid?
Will it be rigged and animated later? What polygon density should the retopology have?
And the texture resolution? Does the game engine you're exporting it to support UDIMS?
Adding an image would help understand the process and help you better.