Baked in lamp shine in 3D text

[Nescolet]

Hello, I would like to know if its possible to use lamps in Blender to generate an UV map for 3D mesh text with baked in lamp shine like you can see in the following example.

I have tried setting up different lamps directed to mesh text but when I bake the texture Blender only generates the shadows and not the shine. I also noticed that the backside of the 3D text is not dark as it should be since it is not illumianted by the lamp I used.

I will appreciate your help. Cheers!



[arton Rotaru]

Cool, it's deleting my post everytime. :matte-motes-dead:

So let's try something else. Check out this thread.

https://community.secondlife.com/t5/Mesh/Specular-Highlights/td-p/1739805

[Drongle McMahon]

Specular highlights are highly dependent on both the lighting and the camera angle, but for baking there is no camera. Without using material nodes, the old Blender render engine simply ignores specular reflections when you do a full bake. If you use material nodes, then the Extended Material node has a spec output socket which contains something like specular highlights. This can be mixed/added into the output. It then gets included in the full bake output. Similarly, with the Cycles render engine, which always uses nodes, you can also get the same highlight-like output in the combines or glossy bakes.

However, the highlights from these bakes are not those you would see from any normal camera, as the baking doesn't use one. Instead they are the highlights you would get by using a different camera for each pixel, pointing at the pixel along the normal at the corresponding point on the mesh surface. This is not like any physically conceivable camera. The result depends only on the lighting. So the baked highlights are not what you see in any rendered image using a particular camera position. Nevertheless, if you want to see highlights with Advanced Lighting turned off, you can often use these bakes to get acceptable effects. As they are fixed, unchanging with either lighting or camera movements, they may conflict with dynamic lighting effects seen when using the Advanced Lighting system with appropriate specular maps and glossiness and environmental reflection parameters.

[Chic Aeon]

I have been working in Cycles Render now for over a year. It was a long road as lots of folks were also wandering through the darkness. ALL our tutorials got better over time.

 

In the beginning I could get a good look in render that did NOT translate into our virtual world. That was very frustrating. But it can definitely be done. Much of it has to do with your lighting set up. Some of it simply comes from lots of practice and knowing what node to tweak or add.

 

After a year I LOVE Cycles. I always aim for a subtle look as I don't like cast shadows or anything that conflicts greatly with the viewer shadow (which I almost always have on). I seldom use textures for normal maps or specular now as they can look beyond awful depending on the Windlight setting. Instead I let Cycles do that for me and the folks that can't run advanced lighting.

 



[Nescolet]

Thank you all for your insight. Now it's time for me to have fun digesting all these bits and steps and get them incorporated into my muscle memory