Bake Fail. Help please? :3

[iCade]

Finished an object and having this strange bake fail.

This is how it is rendered in Blender:

and this is how it comes out in SL:

 

What happened there? How can I actually achieve the rendered result?

[Kwakkelde Kwak]

Two things are going on by the looks of it, one you can easily fix, the other you can't.

The sharp edges you can fix. I don't know how it's called in Blender, but you need to make sure every polygon is in the same smoothing group (no hard edges). The hard edges can also be caused by your UV mapping. SL splits vertices where two materials meet. Also make sure you do not check "generate normals" when uploading.

The fact the object is darker in SL is because of the shaders. You can fix this by setting the texture to full bright, but that will give you a radiating plate of dougnuts at night, not exactly tasty looking.

[iCade]

It's not only darker, there's entire loss of light patches going on there =/ And I've played around with it, and now I am completely at a loss:

 

Why on earth is it baking most of the donuts black?

 

And I've seen baked meshes in world that are far brighter, without the use of full bright, so there must be a way to stop all that grey depressing coloring going on :3

[Dora Gustafson]

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iCade wrote:

Why on earth is it baking most of the donuts black?

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Because you have included a UV map with ambient occlusion. There is no light between the donuts and the plate:)

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iCade wrote:

And I've seen baked meshes in world that are far brighter, without the use of full bright, so there must be a way to stop all that grey depressing coloring going on :3

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When I upload a mesh (not including texture) I get it all colored gray, like you have on your photo

Try edit it to white in the inworld editor. It helps me

:smileysurprised::smileyvery-happy:

[Codewarrior Congrejo]

Okay i'll try too to explain you what's going on:

Problem 1) the sharp edge - as Kwakk already said: ..the sharp edges you can fix. I don't know how it's called in Blender, but you need to make sure every polygon is in the same smoothing group (no hard edges)..

- make sure to select your mesh or its subparts (like each doughnuts, and the plate) in editmode, press A to select all faces at once and in the toolbox (left side) press once solid and then smooth button. This will ensure that the whole surface has the same smoothing going on.
- should you be using smoothing-modifiers delete those.

Problem 2)  why it is darker in SL -  Also here Kwakk gave the correct answer, SL has its own material / shader.

- Depending on the viewer settings it also adds Ambient occlusion and on ultra settings with shadow enabled even a
  shadow on top of it. (that's why AO bakes should be very decent.

- The way how blender renders it, depends on many things: lights in the scene, the AO method, Global Illumination
   playing in, bouncing lights , shadows and much more. (and rendering a szene is a different thing from baking
   a certain pass as texture, because there you have only that one pass on it's own)

- To see how the outcome in SL would be is actually to apply your textures, set the
   material in its settings to 'shadeless', and switch the viewport shader to 'textured' (not solid) > this will give you the
   best insight of how it will look in SL approximately (but as said above, SL will add AO and shadows too, so keep that
   in mind)

- And rather have a look at the texture darkness and colors itself than how it's being rendered in blender.

Problem 3) Why on earth is it baking most of the donuts black?

- Ambient occlusion is calculating light radiation based on the proximity of the surrounding geometry / faces.
  Its a global method, where the illumination at each point is a function of other geometry in the scene.
  (AO is independent from light in scenes)

- Thus your plate and the the doghnuts themselves create stronger AO spots, where they 'touch' each other
  diretcly.The closer the objects are or possibly even intersecting the darker the AO in these spots. And the the whole of
   the doughnut has also 'close' nearby geometry thus has stronger influence.

- Additionally it depends on your Ambient occlusion settings such as :
   gathering method and the sample rates, fall off and normalize etc. Those define how 'strong' the AO becomes / thus
   how dark and also how grey the all over outcome it will be.
   
- AO maps are normally used as soft overlay over the Texturing for an object, for engines where no
  AO is produced insides the engine, or to strengthen the effect a bit should AO be already there. Mostly this is done to 
  reduce rendering costs.

Some possible solutions:

- A settings-independent solution would be to move the objects more apart when doing the AO bake.
  
- Different AO settings: make the most soft AO bake you feel good with, (based on the above mentioned settings)
  and /or  use it as overlay  (multiply or overlay) with low opacity over your final texture.

  Edit: look at Drongles reply he has made a good refference which settings have which influence.

- You could also take your AO bake and manipulate the texture in an imageditor to make it brighter (adjust image
  brightness / contrast etc), and possibly even add a small blurr, or multiply it with a white background.

And heres a video tip for AO baking: http://cgcookie.com/blender/2010/07/06/tip-baking-ambient-occlusion/ 

[Drongle McMahon]

Two important parameters: In the Gather section of the World properties panel, check fallof and set it quite high (see picture). Higher values make the darkness spread less far. In the Bake section of the Camera panel, check Normalize before you bake. That will make it use the whole range from black to white, avoiding a general greying out. You can also adjust this quite easily in any image editor (for instance using the Colors/Curves tool in Gimp). The picture shows four textures in three lighting conditions. Left-to-right, blank, ao with falloff=10, ao with falloff=1, ao with falloff=0. Top-to-bottom, no lighting and shadows, lighting and shadows but no AO, lighting and shadows with AO. Crudely done so there's visible UV seams. Current release viewer. The three baked textures are at the right, 10,1,0 fallof from top to bottom.

ETA - changed "lower" to "higher" :smileysurprised:

[iCade]

Thanks a bunch everyone, was having the hardest time wrapping my head around this, kudos everyone for explaining it so thoroughly, I understand it a lot better now! :smileyhappy: