Photogrametry Prosessing
In Houdini
November 13, 2025
Part 2: Texture Baking Troubleshoot
When we assembled all of the texture maps for LOD01 (100k polygons) and rendered the asset in the virtual environment for the first time, we noticed that the lighting behaved unexpectedly on the surface, resulting in an unrealistic appearance. After isolating potential causes, we identified the normal map as a primary contributor to this shading issue. Because of that, our main focus this week was troubleshooting the texture-baking process.
I. Existing Issues
The first challenge arose from attempting to bake normal and displacement maps in COPs. Since COPs is GPU-accelerated, it requires the full high-resolution mesh to be loaded into GPU memory. Attempting to process a 14-million-polygon mesh in this context quickly maxes out GPU resources, leading to frequent crashes and making the workflow unstable—and potentially harmful to the hardware over time. In my testing, COPs consistently failed to render 8K EXR maps due to GPU memory exhaustion.
The second issue was that the normal maps produced in COPs lacked accuracy. They introduced incorrect shading responses in Solaris, causing strange light roll-offs and unrealistic surface highlights.
Real reference
LOD01 in virtual environment
II. Troubleshooting Map Baking Process in SOP
As an alternative, I tested SideFX Labs Maps Baker at the SOP level, which relies primarily on system RAM instead of VRAM. This allowed the baking process to complete successfully, producing clean and stable normal maps suitable for use in the virtual environment.
For next week, my goal is to finalize and standardize a reliable baking pipeline using SOP-level tools, while continuing to investigate whether an optimized COPs workflow is feasible for future iterations.