How to make shadow maps with blender

[BadEddy]

So I'm glad to realize I'm now able to make basic objects that actully look good. That's a big step I'd say.

 

Today I try to make shadow maps I can use in SL and I'm struggling with that quite a bit. I can assign faces to my items and that's it.

Does anyone know a good step by step guide that can walk me through this process?

[Aquila Kytori]

Hi

Usually the learning process is, modeling, UV unwrapping, and then texturing.

So you are at the texturing stage, normally its learning how to Bake out an  Ambient Occlusion (AO) texture before learning how to bake out shadow textures because:

1: You need to mess about with lighting setups to bake shadows.

2: For SL if you have textures with shadows already on them they can look strange when people have Shadows enabled inworld. For axample you bake in shadows lit from the right side in Blender but then inworld the Sun happens to be on the left so casting shadowsin the oposite direction

3: Its the AO shading that will make your mesh pop

You could have alook at this thread  https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Ambient-Occlusion-for-Blender-tuts/m-p/2876281#M30051

   But now you know its probably Ambient Occlusion baking you want, with Google you will find plenty of Blender tutorials on the subject and others on what to do with your AO texture.

[Coby Foden]

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Aquila Kytori wrote:

 

... with Google you will find plenty of Blender tutorials on the subject and others on what to do with your AO texture.

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Indeed so, there are lots of tutorial videos available about ambient occlusion. Like these for example:

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=Blender+AO+baking

[BadEddy]

Thank you for your replies. I'll sit down and read those links. And actually, I guess I'm more at the UV unwrapping stage right now. I have my mesh model and this is where I am pretty much.