Blender blurred baked texture

[Morris Venenbaum]

Hello,

I've added a picture of the problem below.
Left side shows the texture (orig size 166x166px) on the model, right side shows baked texture on uvmap.
The size has been set to xyz 20 (see settings in the texture menu on the very right).

UVMap size is 1024x1024.

Its very blurred.

How can this be avoided or improved? Are there s
And how can I get a high quality into SL?

What other options can you recommend?
I'm totally lost here and have no idea what to do.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

This would be easier to describe if you showed us the original 166x166 texture, and the UV map(s). However, it looks roughly as if you have, say, at least 8 repeats of your 166x166 texture across one side of a leg in the rendered picture. That looks like about 100 ridges in the denim weave. On the right, what looks like half a leg across has about 1128 pixels. So ypu are tryomg to squeeze 1000 pixels, and 100 ridges, into 128 pixels. That is impossible. So the ridge texture is completely lost when the repeated texture is squeezed to fit the area allocated to it, by the UV map, in the 1024x1024 image. A fixed size texture absolutly cannot represent detail smaller than its pixels. In fact it can't reasonably represent details smaller than a few pixels.

If you need baked textures, you can get some improvement by maximising the area of the UV map devoted to each area of cloth, by eliminating unused UV space. You might be able to overlap the UV maps of left and right legs. If you really must have more detail, you can use multiple materials, each of which can have its own 1024x1024 textyre, at the cost of increasing lag. I don't think these approaches will give you enough detail to see the ridges in your denim.

Of course, if you can do without baking, then you can simply repeat the texture inside SL, easily giving more than enough detail to see the ridges. All that's required for that is careful design of the UV map to accomodate a fkat repeated texture, with all the islands correctly oriented. However, that means no baked shadows or ambient occlusion.

If you want to go to extremes length, you could overlay your mesh with a second set of faces. Then put the repeated tiled texture on the lower layer, and an alpha bake of the shadowing on the upper one. This is probably much more work thab is worthwhile, increases the lag hugely (transparency is bad), and might be a nightmare for rigged mesh movements.

 

 

[Morris Venenbaum]

Drongle, thank you very much for your explanation.

As you might already figured I'm new to texturing and I still did not grasp the basics.

 

If I understand correct, its not usual to create textures by baking them in Blender.
So I would export the uvmap of my model only and start painting the texture in Photoshop?

 

I thought about baking shadows only in Blender and use that together with a drawn texture in PS as overlay.

 

[Drongle McMahon]

If I understand correct, its not usual to create textures by baking them in Blender.

No. Sorry, I must have been very unclear. :matte-motes-crying:

It is perfectly normal, and effective  to bake textures in Blender. The problem is that you are expecting to see details that are smalller than the pixels in the baked texture. That will be the same however you malke the texture. If you need to see more detail, then you have to have more UV space to fit it in, so that the features of the detail are larger than a few pixels. You can do this by changing the UV mapping, with larger islands, overlapping islands, or separate materials. Otherwise, you can forgo the advantages of baking and use repeats of a simple texture in SL. To get small details, you need to be stretching a lot of pixels over a given area of your mesh surface. That is the case however you go about making the texture.

ETA: if you look at your baked texture image, which you have zoomed in on so that we can see the individual pixels (increase brightness and contrast to see properly), you can see there are only about 128 pixels across the pieces shown. That is not enough to have a texture with hundreds of ridges of denim weave on it. I can't tell how big the whole texture is, because the borders aren't visible, although you said it was 1024x1024.