Thread: New technique
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Old 11-01-19, 13:21   #238
teme9
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Hopefully I did not miss anything from your video The seams seem still very visible on your model. I think this might be the best result you can have unfortunately. I would love to see your work files about the switch. I'd like to take a peek and go through them if could spot something that is out of place. If that suits you of course

About the resize / swap wording. You're absolutely correct that it was confusing! I didn't even stop to think it that way. By not having English as my first language, stuff like this happens way too easily.

About the resizing:
The way you did is one way to do it. Creating an empty texture then saving it and resizing it in another program - it works. Blender does not have resize function to scale textures up in the UV/Image editor. Alternative way is to create a new texture in Blender by pressing the + button in the UV/Image editing view and making it have that 512x 512 size. You would then need to assign this to the object that you're about to bake to. Basically going into the edit mode, selecting all vertices of the object and selecting all UV islands in the UV editor then selecting the newly created bigger texture from the drop down menu in the UV editor view.

About the baking options:
"Clear" basically is an option that tells Blender to erase all the data from the texture that it bakes to before it starts to bake. If you leave this box unchecked it will just bake over the current active texture that it is going to bake to.
"Selection to Active" basically tells the Baker to render all the selected objects onto the active object. If you leave this out it will try bake all the objects that are selected using the scene lighting & materials. In this case your lightmapped packed object would not receive any textures from the original model and would result most likely in a blank black texture.

Also baking does not support alpha channel as far as I now. It cannot bake transparency correctly.


Lost bake result

The reason why you lost the texture after baking, saving and quitting Blender is quite simple: you forgot to save your texture out!


If you check your video around 7:51 - 9:27 you will notice that in the UV editor view near the drop down menu there's a navigation text near the bottom of the view called "Image". Next to that is a "*" symbol that indicates that the result has not been saved out. Saving the Blender file does not save the render/bake result automatically.

UV/Image editor texture changes between modes
UV image editor does react to the mode you are in on the 3D view. That is one of the reason why it changes. It also can change depending of your selection in edit mode. It will try to show you what your current selection is on your 3D model and tries to show you what that current selection uses as a texture. When you go out from the edit mode it will most likely swap to something else that you were looking during object mode. (It's a rather confusing "feature").

Texture resize up-down
The scale up / down part is an optional part which may help to improve the texture quality. Sometimes the bake result can become a little bit blurry when rendering to the actual use size. When you bake it at higher res it has more detail that when resized back to the actual size may improve the look and feel of the texture. It's pretty much a gimmick though.

Seeing information about the current texture in UV editor
About the UV/Image editor: There are no rulers available as far as I know but luckily there is a way to get information about the current texture.

If you navigate to the bottom of the view and look for the "view" menu there should be an option to toggle visibility of properties toolbar.

I hope this was helpful Let me know if I missed some points of yours and I'll get back to you!
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