Baking textures, shadows, and especially AO to diffuse/spec/normal ONLY in Blender. Hints? Tips?

[Elissa Taka]

In the past I've used Blender to model and Substance to bake AO, shadows, etc. As much as I kind of like Substance, it's an awkward setup. This year I'd love to switch completely to Blender.

My few tests a year or two ago weren't that great. I know the basics of hooking input texture nodes into the principled bsdf node, and kind of enough to bake output (barely)... but the resulting textures came out too dark for starters, and I don't think the baked spec and normal maps were correct.

I did a search in this forum section but didn't see anything specifically about using Blender 100%. Does anyone know of some good posts, or even some external info (YouTube, blog posts, etc) that talk about doing this? Or any hints or tips? (For what it's worth, everything I do are things like furniture, signs, etc.. not clothing).

 

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

For baking in general, this video isn't bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYvgFWEiNp8

(Note: It's a little unusual that the presenter uses Blender to turn a bump map into a normal map. I think that's usually done with a direct conversion tool like https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ or a filter in something like GIMP. You also always want to set a normal map's Color Space to Non-Image in its image texture node! Don't leave it on sRGB. Big, big oversight there.)

 

Texture baking is used for lots of things from Blender to SL, sometimes more than one at once:

• Creating a single material & texture from multiple materials (which is tricky and involves multiple UV maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9airvjDaVh4)
• Capturing a snapshot image of a procedurally-generated texture.
• Creating a normal map for your object based on details sculpted into an extra-high-poly version of it (excellent coverage at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r-cGjVKvGw)
• Burning directionless nook-and-cranny shadows and/or light-source-produced shadows and reflections onto an object's diffuse texture for added photorealism, especially for residents who aren't running SL with full graphics options.
• Generating those last things I just mentioned as standalone images for texture artists to use as overlays.

 

 

[Elissa Taka]

32 minutes ago, Quarrel Kukulcan said:

For baking in general, this video isn't bad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYvgFWEiNp8

(Note: It's a little unusual that the presenter uses Blender to turn a bump map into a normal map. I think that's usually done with a direct conversion tool like https://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ or a filter in something like GIMP. You also always want to set a normal map's Color Space to Non-Image in its image texture node! Don't leave it on sRGB. Big, big oversight there.)

 

Texture baking is used for lots of things from Blender to SL, sometimes more than one at once:

• Creating a single material & texture from multiple materials (which is tricky and involves multiple UV maps: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9airvjDaVh4)
• Capturing a snapshot image of a procedurally-generated texture.
• Creating a normal map for your object based on details sculpted into an extra-high-poly version of it (excellent coverage at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0r-cGjVKvGw)
• Burning directionless nook-and-cranny shadows and/or light-source-produced shadows and reflections onto an object's diffuse texture for added photorealism, especially for residents who aren't running SL with full graphics options.
• Generating those last things I just mentioned as standalone images for texture artists to use as overlays.

 

 

That exactly the kind of stuff I was looking for. Thanks!!