Having Problems in Baking

[131129]

Can anyone explain why my Baked Textures look different from render , It looks lighter for some parts and darker for other , also i know gloss and glass bsdf can't be baked so is there any trick to add glossiness to baked textures.

Blender Cycles

Edited May 22, 2018 by 131129

[Chic Aeon]

Very seldom do I see a finished texture in SL that looks just like the render display in the viewport -- this after three years in Cycles. So the mental trick it to know what to expect when you get inworld -- and TESTING a lot of course.    The more you work and understand the lighting, the more control you have over your final work 

The trick to glossy is partly the glossy shader node and partly your light set up.  Experimenting will hopefully get you closer to the look you want.   Glass is pretty much like "metal" that you turn transparent inworld.  Some creators still hand paint their glass textures.  

 

I am not seeing how your question relates to Bakes on Mesh but perhaps I don't really understand what the new ability will do :D.    

Good luck. 

[Kyrah Abattoir]

This is wrong section. But here is an answer anyway.

A still render is taken from a single point of view, all the lighting is computed from that single camera.

A texture bake is taken per pixel and the camera is in a specific projected position according to your rendering cage, for each pixel (it's probably not exactly how it works but it's the "idea").

Don't even think about getting the same glossss and reflection as you get on still renders for the simple reason that glossyness depends of the surface orientation to the lighting and cameras, while reflections depend on the surface orientation of the camera and whatever is being reflected.

Baking is "normally" not used to capture a complete render, it's mostly used to capture specific light/camera/relflection independent aspects such as normals, specularity, or the diffuse color of complex materials.

If you want to capture a complete render you're gonna do a lot of material tweaking, plain faking and simplification to achieve an acceptable result.

Edited May 22, 2018 by Kyrah Abattoir

[131129]

Thanks , I'll try some tweaking  

 

[Nalates Urriah]

I'll try putting this in a bit different framework.

Consider a RL house. The paint on the house is similar to the diffuse texture. We do not paint in shadows nor ambient occlusion nor bump/normal maps. The RL 3D surface, i.e., shingles, etc., provides what a bump/normal provides. The sun or moon provides the shadows. The matt or glossy paint or substance type, i.e., glass or brick, provides the shininess or lack of.

In a rendered world we need to reduce polygon count. We do that and provide the 3D surface of the building with normal/bump maps. We can omit modeling individual shingles or engravings.

We use the specular map to provide the shiny, matt, or glossy nature of the building's materials.

We use lights, shadow simulation, and ambient light and occlusion simulators to provide the shadows and realistic lighting. This happens at render time, which in SL is real to near real time.

In games where there is static lighting or a static nature to the area modeled we eliminate the simulation of shadows and occlusion to save render time. We bake in the shadows and occlusion. BUT... if we bake those in and then tell the render engine to do shadows and occlusion too, we have twice as many shadows and too much ambient occlusion. We also end up with shadows that do not move, the baked ones, and shadows that do move, the rendered ones. It looks strange.

Before we had shadows and occlusion in the SL render engine we faked shadows and either made them using prims and textures or baked them in when we made the diffuse texture.

With the addition of SL materials we could stop baking in shiny/reflective light spots. Look at clothes that looked like shiny latex and silk made before the time of materials. The shiny reflection spots never move. Now with SL materials we skip baking in the lighting hotspots and let the render engine provide them. We create the specular layer and let the render engine do the rest.

Now Bakes On Mesh is coming. The existing Avatar Baking Service was added years ago. The classic avatar has skin, tattoo, underwear, and clothes layers. Long ago the viewer baked all those layers into the three composite images that made up what we saw. Every viewer baked all those layers. The textures could all be 1024 textures. So, 3 parts; lower, upper, and head times 4 layers each made for 12 textures that had to bake to 3. The 1024 textures could run that up to about  50MB of texture our video card had to deal with. So, as network speed increased it was smart to add the bake service and take that load off the viewer. The bake service provides 3 textures rendered at 512px. Saving about 47MB of texture load and data transfer. Plus the textures only bake once and the result of the single bake is shared with everyone.

Now the bake service is being modified to Bake On Mesh... meaning our mesh bodies. The changes are the Lindens are increasing the texture size to 1024 and letting us provide a target on which to apply the shared baked composite texture. To use the existing infrastructure and methods of making clothes the classic avatar system is being used. It gets modified with an addition of a spec for where the baked texture is going. 

While Bakes On Mesh is a kludge and somewhat inelegant, Yet, it is a brilliant hack using existing infrastructure already in place that avoids rebuilding the entire SL system and gets us a big improvement in a small time frame.

What is still up in the air is materials. The baking service does NOT handle materials. AFAIK, there is no standard or reliable way to bake specular and normal maps into composite maps. Does the designer of underwear want visible panty lines or not? And what about the one designing yoga pants? Do they have a say? And the one wearing both? Attempting to push that decision into the automated system adds considerable complication. Plus, giving users any control compounds the process and the user learning curve. So, for now... spec and norm maps will remain in the realm of Appliers and outside the baking service.