I invert normals to bake correctly?

[Pamela Galli]

I have this mesh, a porch ceiling in Blender, that some faces of baked either black or almost black, no matter how much light was on them,  exactly as if normals were flipped. Except normals were not flipped.  So after baking for hours (yes, hours) I tried flipping the normals on those faces -- this made those faces transparent, but they baked pretty normally -- just a little darker than I wanted.

Has anyone experienced this?

[Dilbert Dilweg]

What Kind of lighting do you have set up during the bake?

If you dont have a hemi light  in the sceen maYBE try that, The hemi lights all sides

[Masami Kuramoto]

.blend files, or it didn't happen.

Does the problem persist after you restart Blender?

[Pamela Galli]

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Dilbert Dilweg wrote:

What Kind of lighting do you have set up during the bake?

If you dont have a hemi light  in the sceen maYBE try that, The hemi lights all sides

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Thanks, I did not realize hemi had that property. I tried area and point.

Anyway, after baking the texture with the normals reversed (which Blender baked as normals normal), I put the normals back as they were and uploaded. But when uploaded, the normals were reversed on those faces -- ie invisible.  So I have decided to just make the mesh over from scratch -- it is simple. Already spent too much time fiddling with it.

 

ETA  Exported as obj. and now it is perfect.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Pamela when this happens it's possible that  these "misbehaving" faces did not get assigned to a the bake texture with  the rest of the porch faces.  In face select mode in the edit window select all faces you want to bake to and in the UV texture space delete whatever texture appears by clicking the x to clear the texture assignment (you may not actually see a texture in the UV space, but do this anyway) and then with all the faces selected add a new bake texture then rebake.

 

[Masami Kuramoto]

Unassigned faces wouldn't bake at all, even after flipping the normals.

Blender 2.63 is known to have some issues with normals. This could be one of them.

There was a follow-up bugfix release 2.63a. Has Pamela installed it?

[Pamela Galli]

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Nacy Nightfire wrote:

Pamela when this happens it's possible that  these "misbehaving" faces did not get assigned to a the bake texture with  the rest of the porch faces.  In face select mode in the edit window select all faces you want to bake to and in the UV texture space delete whatever texture appears by clicking the x to clear the texture assignment (you may not actually see a texture in the UV space, but do this anyway) and then with all the faces selected add a new bake texture then rebake.

 

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I can't remember if I tried this or not.  There were so many things wrong with not just those faces but the whole mesh, which which joined to other meshes failed to upload inworld (joined not linked) -- after importing as obj it is fine.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Yes unassigned faces wouldn't bake and the faces would appear black.  That seems to be what Pamela was experiencing.

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Nacy Nightfire wrote:

Yes unassigned faces wouldn't bake and the faces would appear black.  That seems to be what Pamela was experiencing.

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They were no longer black after she flipped the normals and baked again.