Yet another Blender texturing mystery

[Pamela Galli]

So I have textured several brick objects with a brick material and I want to texture some steps (a separate object so buyers can choose whether they want to use them or not). So here is what the texture window looks like to begin with:

Then I click Bake (Full Render) and this is what happens:

 

 

Happens over and over.  I refresh the brick texture and it comes back, but each time I bake, it turns black.

[Frawmusl]

I have not used blender in quite awhile, so don't hold me to this.

 

When you bake textures it bakes the light with your texture, You need to change the lighting applied to your mesh and make it even/bright. It is black by default I believe..

[Dilbert Dilweg]

I notice in the first image. On the Bottom right, your image says hardwood (unique data block) and the source file is brick just below that,. is there a reason both of those are not the same? Looks like it is just baking the target image you have set up for the bake

[Nacy Nightfire]

Pamela, 

Double check that in the material pallete setting under the heading OPTIONS that FACE TEXTURES is UNchecked.

Edited to add:  Make sure at the same time your texture is checked on in the materials texture palette.

If that doesn't work, check that you don't have more then one camera in the scene.  If you have a second camera delete it.

 

 

[Pamela Galli]

Thank you all for the feedback.  Dilbert, I don't have any idea why it says hardwood down there; I do have a hardwood texture that I used but how the name got there I could not say.

Nacy, checked  those things and they are okay. I had been baking the same material today and all went well with those.

However, the term "target texture" dimly rang a bell, tho still not sure what it means, and I tried opening a new blank texture -- voila, it baked fine..  Such a simple thing. I have no idea why it was baking to the brick texture, which it occurs to me might mean that the brick is a source texture? Or something.

[Alisha Matova]

Ya know, I experienced that the other day. A few trys into baking a multiple mesh scene Blender really mixed up which faces baked to whatever image. I figured I did something wrong or maybe ran out of memory. It wasn't too hard to untangle, but did kinda worry me. I'm Still on old 2.49(yeah, =P) so I'm not sure if what your seeing and I saw are even related...

 

/ramble

[Masami Kuramoto]

---

Pamela Galli wrote:

I have no idea why it was baking to the brick texture, which it occurs to me might mean that the brick is a source texture? Or something.

---

It was both the source and the target at the same time.

You loaded herringbone_red_brick_tiled_small.bmp into the image datablock "hardwood", possibly overwriting some wood texture that was loaded there previously. You linked that image datablock "hardwood" to the texture datablock "Brick.003" to use it as a source for baking. And you linked "hardwood" to the UV map that you used as a bake target. By default, the first step in a bake operation is to clear the target image. This is what caused the "hardwood" image to turn black. Then the bake proceeded, transferring black pixels from Brick.003-->hardwood to UVMap-->hardwood.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Excellent info Masami.  Thanks very much.  I personally find data blocks very confusing. If you have time to explain or point me or anyone else to a good tutorial source which explains this Blender concept, I'd be very grateful.  

And if anyone else with a good grasp of this cares to also chime in here or a seperate new thread about Data Blocks I would appreciate your help with this very much.

[Dilbert Dilweg]

Awesome for explaining that better. I  figured that that was an issue because it was the unique datablock for the hardwood and not the brick. I just didnt have the technical ability to explain it fully. lol

[Pamela Galli]

Thank you Masami -- I am surprised anyone had any clue about this. It is all very confusing, and it looks like very few here have a very deep grasp of these things -- things that obviously important to understand, as I keep tripping over them.

[Masami Kuramoto]

Probably the most straightforward way to get an overview of Blender's datablock hierarchy is by looking at the outliner window. By default it shows a simplified view with the scene datablock as the root element. If you expand a scene node, you'll see objects at the first level, then assets (meshes, lamps, cameras etc.), then materials, then textures, and finally images.

To get a complete overview of the currently loaded .blend file, switch to display mode "Datablocks". At the top level you will see several tables, one per asset type. These tables contain, in a flat layout and sorted by name, all the major datablocks that occur in the current project: all the scenes, all the meshes, all the cameras, all the lamps, all the materials etc.

To explore the relationship between those datablocks, expand their corresponding nodes in the outliner window. For example, each "Scene" has a collection of "Objects". Each "Object" has a "Data" link to a mesh or a lamp or a camera etc. Each "Mesh" has collections of "Vertices", "Polygons", "Materials" etc. Each "Material" has a table of "Textures" etc.

Any of those top-level datablocks can be shared by multiple others in a parent-child relationship. Materials can be shared between meshes, which can be shared between objects, which can be shared between scenes. Whenever a datablock is shared and appears at multiple places in the datablock hierarchy, it is called a "linked duplicate" in Blender terms. The parents of a linked duplicate are not necessarily the same type of datablock. For example, materials can be shared by any type of renderable asset: meshes, curves, metaballs etc.

If you expand a "Mesh" node, you'll find an entry called "UV Maps". As the name suggests, this is where UV maps appear if the mesh has been unwrapped. Inside a UV map datablock there is a "Data" entry containing a list of UV map faces. Be careful when expanding the "Data" node because a complex mesh will produce thousands of UV map face nodes in the outliner window, which may freeze the UI for quite some time. Choose something simple here, e.g. an unwrapped cube. If you inspect any of those UV map faces, you'll see an entry called "Image". This explains how images can become linked duplicates at both ends of a bake operation.

[Nacy Nightfire]

Thank you so much Masami...that was a wonderful explanation!  :matte-motes-smile:

[Pamela Galli]

Mind boggling... and I am so lucky that Masami has volunteered to review my Blender files!