Maya

rendering-lighting

Baking multiple poly faces with alpha to a base mesh

I asked this in another thread but maybe I put it in the wrong subforum.

I have multiple square polygons with, for example, branches and leaves images. I would like to bake that information down to a base mesh.

This is easy if it were a flat plane, because I could just take a render and project it onto a mesh. But what if the base mesh is a sphere or more complex object? (For example, vines around a statue)

I will provide images if necessary, but it's fairly straightforward. Attempting to bake any more than 1 polygonal layer with alpha starts to produce a completely visible outline of the polygons instead of the texture information excluding the alpha.

I could use some tips, can anyone help?