3DS Max 2011 textureing help

[Anakin Crystal]

OKwell most of you might not use 3ds max, but the question is regarding the texturing in 3ds max. I have noticed that when you use skylight and you use soft shadows on the texture and you import to sl as a .jpg...its blurry. 

 

So my question is.. whats the best lighting scene  to use.. im not famailiar with vray just yet..however if thats the way i need to go i will go into it. 

I am just tired of my baked textures being so blurry. I do use skylight alot with soft shadows enabeled. 

So its either im doing something wronng in SL or MAX?  i have uploaded a texture map from the RTT with lighting but was pretty dark. 

 So i need to get you allsperferences in the lighting and what do you all use. 

 

   -Anakin-

[Madeliefste Oh]

At what size and what  file format do you safe your texture before uploading to SL?

I hope you don't safe them as jpg's, because that makes you loose quality. Next the jpg that already lost quality looses again in the upload proces to SL. So you loose two times with jpg.

When the texture is without transparency you get the best results with uploading as tga 24 bits or png 24 bits.
For transparency the png 32 bits it most easy to use as upload format.

Render them at at least 1024 x 1024. But 2048 x 2048 or 4096 x 4096 is also okay. Then scale them back by in your graphical program to 1024 x 1024 before uploading.

I did experiment quit a bit with baking textures and light settings, but since the resultshardly satisfied me on the endproducts in SL I'm back to the manual methode. The only thing I bake is an ambient occlusion map, though they don't come out bad, I still often have to that I often correct by hand in Photoshop.

It depends a bit on your object, for example for baking shadows and  window refections on a floor of a room, I still would consider baking shadowmaps that are archieved by the use light sourses, but  for objects where you can walk around in SL for me is working with just the  AO maps the best.

 

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

It's really difficult to say anything sensible, since there are countless possible situations and countless settings.

The main question is: what are you trying to achieve?

There is no "perfect setting" for all scenes or all objects, all scenes require different ones.

So if you can post the next:

- what are you trying to bake? (for example shadows under an indoor coffee table in a marble room or shadows cast by an outdoor wall at noon on a wet surface or shadows cast at night by a spotlight on a stucco wall, etc)

- what renderer do you use? (Mental ray, default scanline, etc)

- what kind of materials do you use? (standard, arch&design, etc)

- what kind of lights do you use? (standard or photometric)

 

Going by what you posted so far I can only agree with what Madeliefste said, jpg isn't the best way to save in almost all cases and you could try to increase your soft shadows precision multiplier. (Render Setup -> Renderer, it's on top in Global tuning parameters)

I can't agree on using a 1024 for shadows. Shadows are usually quite soft so it would be a waste of resources to use the highest available resolution for them.

For quick outdoor renders I usually just use a daylight system. That gives pretty good results by default.

Btw, what exactly do you mean by "blurry"? With a precision multiplier too low, a resolution too low and the jpg compression messing with your shadows, I'd expect the result to be pixelated, not blurred. Could you post a picture?