Baking Questions

[Spinell]

Hello everyone, I'm still very new in learning mesh and baking textures has been something I have yet to get functioning properly.

I have made my mesh clothing, rigged it properly and everything's in check, so I want to make the alpha layer so I can import this to SL to test how it looks.

here's the steps I've taken, just to clarify:

1. Select the upper-body of the 3-part avatar, open a UV map window, go into edit mode, select all vertices both in the avatar upper-body as well as in the UV map and save the image.

2. Assign a material with a strong colour to the upper-body

3. Shift-select both the layers with my mesh clothing and the layers with the avatar so I can see them both

4. Select the mesh and the shift-select the upper-body of the 3-part avatar

5. go to render, bake, tick the box "selected to active", select from the dropdown menu "textuires" and press bake.

Unfortunately, the bake image I get in the UV map doesn't correspond with the clothing at all. I have tried every option form the dropdown menu, but none show me the clean UV map that I want to use to make the alpha.

What am I doing wrong?

Thank you so much for the help!

[Luc Starsider]

You have to remember that the alpha layer is applied to the avatar, not your mesh clothing. Thus it will not use the uv map you made for your clothing, but the one for the avatar. This may be why it seems different than you expect.

 

- Luc -

[Ashasekayi Ra]

What program are you using for baking?

[Spinell]

Using Blender 2.6

[Poenald Palen]

I ended up just projection painting from renders. I was using particles and this worked out better for me. Not sure if that helps with what you are doing though and it is a longer process. But I noticed this, baking is a bit...well, not so easy as you would think.

I can think of this, off the top of my head. If you have the UV unwrapped the same there might be a way to simply match the size of the same object and make the UV lined up and shaped the same on both UV maps. Then, you simply render the higher one and then swap it! It should line up with a little editing to accomadote the corners and curves being less smooth and having angles. Not sure about that, but gimp has iwarp to help you try. 

By uv maps being the same I mean the parts are teh same orienation and size on both UV textures.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

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Spinell wrote:

Using Blender 2.6

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I can't find anything wrong with your workflow. I've used it previously to start off an alpha mask. So, it should work properly. It would help to see a picture of the issue though. When you do that sort of projection with two objects that have vastly different topology, the map will not look perfect and have many errors that need to be cleaned up. You may want to try the program Xnormal for this instead.