Is there an external Blender renderer that bakes for SL?

[Pamela Galli]

I tried Lux Render and it does not seem to have a bake function.

[Nalates Urriah]

I'm not sure what you mean by "bakes for SL." There is no special bake for SL.

[Pamela Galli]

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Nalates Urriah wrote:

I'm not sure what you mean by "bakes for SL." There is no special bake for SL.

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It is shorthand for  "can be used to bake textures for SL".

[Zslash Cyberstar]

no sure what you mean but, bakeing what? ambient occlusion ? normal ? color? uv ? what? i assume u wanna bake AO - Ambient Occlusion in that case you can use blender, maya, 3ds max, cinema 4d, and many other programs, most 3d modeleing apps can bake textures, and those will work for sl as long as the uv map is the same as on the one u bake it on.

[Luc Starsider]

There may be external renderers you can use to bake textures. The only one I know is Blender internal, though, but I'm hoping Cycles will gain support for baking in the not to distant future...

You can create some pretty good textures using the internal renderer. You may have looked in to it, but using node based materials lets you bake thing you can not do without nodes - like specular highlights - as well as combining materials and textures in different ways, so it's worth spending some time on setting up nodes.

- Luc -

[Pamela Galli]

Thank you for your comments all.  Here is a loveseat I textured (and modeled) in Blender.

I know how to texture things in Blender.

I know how to create specular highlights in Blender.

Let me try to explain my question:

 

1) I sometimes have problems baking -- such as AO, full render -- in Blender.

1) I installed Lux Render to the Add Ons but see that I cannot bake textures for application in SL.

2) I wondered:  Is there anything else I could use to bake textures for SL -- such as AO or full render -- besides Blender -- preferably which can be integrated like Lux Render but that is not necessary?

 

 

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

1) I sometimes have problems baking -- such as AO, full render -- in Blender.

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What kind of problems?

[Pamela Galli]

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Masami Kuramoto wrote:

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Pamela Galli wrote:

1) I sometimes have problems baking -- such as AO, full render -- in Blender.

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What kind of problems?

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Pffft, let me count the ways.  This is from an attempt to bake a wall a couple minutes ago:

 

[Pamela Galli]

What Blender is doing is taking like a screenshot of whatever scene is opposite the wall I am baking, and bakes that image onto the wall.  I congratulate those who don't have problems with Blender but I have them more or less constantly. Here is another example of an opposite wall bake:

 

[Luc Starsider]

Is this bake showing a wall across the room, facing the wall in the screenshot, or is it the oposite side of the wall in the screenshot. (I'm assuming the first...)

Also, could you post a screenshot of the bake settings you use in Blender?

ETA: I'm thinking - but could be very wrong - that this has to do with the Distance and/or Bias settings in the bake panel...

- Luc -

[Masami Kuramoto]

The black areas on the door frame on the right look like there is something wrong with your UV mapping. The baked ambient occlusion on that wall clearly belongs to a different part of the model. You have to be careful when using overlapping UV islands, because the bakes will overwrite each other unless you assign separate images to each of the overlapping parts.

[Pamela Galli]

It is a wall across the room facing the wall in the screenshot, yes.  In the first case actually two walls, one behind the other.  Here are the bake settings only, but I think I only just checked Select to Active after this weird baking of meshes across the room:

 

[Pamela Galli]

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Masami Kuramoto wrote:

The black areas on the door frame on the right look like there is something wrong with your UV mapping.

 The baked ambient occlusion on that wall clearly belongs to a different part of the model.

You have to be careful when using overlapping UV islands, because the bakes will overwrite each other unless you assign separate images to each of the overlapping parts.

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At this point the doorframes are not linked to the wall meshes. In the second picture what is being baked is the view of one wall behind another -- two discontiguous meshes. 

[Drongle McMahon]

I think the Selected to Active is specifically there for baking the appearance of one mesh onto the UV map of another, usually for getting the appearance detail of highr poly models int the texture of lower poly models. If that was checked when you did your bake, that might explain the results.

[Luc Starsider]

I was going to say something similar to what Drongle said. I wouldn't have Selected to active checked unless you actually wanted to bake the textures from one object on to another.

But did you say you had these issues even without the Selected to active option checked?

- Luc -

[Pamela Galli]

I selected that after it started bakingc something besides the selected wall mesh. My understanding is that you can bake one object mesh to another,c something like that. The fact that the problem disacppeared on restart tells me it was another Blender bug. Which is why I am not asking about Blender baking problemJs any more but looking for something else to use.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

You may want to try a free (but powerful) program called XNormal for an AO bake alternative. I use it a great deal for making AO (and normal map) bakes for items I've made in Blender or Zbrush.  XNormal can do a number of various different types of bakes. Very useful program.

FYI: XNormal will export an AO map that you'll have to combine with your color map in Photoshop.

[Masami Kuramoto]

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Pamela Galli wrote:

The fact that the problem disacppeared on restart tells me it was another Blender bug.

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If the problem disappeared after a restart, then the bakes were probably OK but displayed wrong in the 3D view. Could be due to an outdated OpenGL driver. Are you using a Mac? Or a PC with Intel graphics?

I've seen computers where Blender was totally unstable. For example, on an old (ca. 2005) PC at my workplace, Blender will crash as soon as I use extruded curves, text objects or meta objects. That's with the official release binaries from blender.org, not some unstable test build. MakeHuman also behaves weird on that machine, showing UV mapping errors when I switch between proxy meshes. I could not reproduce any of these bugs on my PCs at home which use Nvidia graphics. So if your computer uses Nvidia or ATI, make sure the drivers are up to date. If it uses Intel graphics, you're probably out of luck.

[Pamela Galli]

I am on an iMac, a year old, and yes I have long thought Blender was just not stable on it, it was so buggy in so many ways -- but esp for texturing.  I am right on the edge of getting c4d but so loathe the idea of having to learn it when Blender has been so difficult (and I never could have learned anything without Nacy Nightfire's help).

[Pamela Galli]

Thanks so much Asha, just what I was asking for. 

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Welcome