Working with Mesh Groups in Unity

Mesh Groups is one of the new features added to MightyBake for Unity. It is a simple but powerful tool to creating more complex bakes. They allow you to bake without having to explode your mesh or create complex cages. When they are overlapping, they can create unwanted artifacts. Mesh Groups will all be rendered into the same UV map, but they will do so with separate target and source meshes.

Goal – You want to create a single bake with several pieces on your object without them interfering.

Picture showing the artifact

Step 1 – Create a mesh groups

• Click the ‘+’ button to add a new group
• Create a new for each separate component of your object
• Name them so you can remember what they each are

Step 2 – Click the ‘Edit Groups’

• This will open the bake in a window that can be used without having the object selected

Step 3 – Add the objects

• Select the target meshes for each group and click ‘Add Selected’ on the corresponding group
• Select the source meshes for each group and click ‘Add Selected ‘ no the corresponding group

Images

Step 4 – Click Bake

• All the objects will now bake into the same map
• You won’t have to worry about the objects that are nearby

Step 5 – [AO Only] ‘Use All Groups’ option

• When baking AO, you have the option of using all groups, rather than just the one that the target mesh is in, when calculating AO. This will mean that you will get the benefit of the group to create a clean transfer, but then you get all the contact shadows for the whole object.

Image

If you want to add a lot of groups, you may want to consider Name Matching instead.