Better Baking - Cycles

[Chic Aeon]

So typically when I bake in Blender I end up with ragged "inside" edges. Places where another piece of mesh intersects. While I don't love intersecting meshes, sometimes that is the best choice for poly count etc. And sometimes even when edges DON'T intersect there is a very ragged edge.

 

Adding a larger margin does nothing to help these "inside" edges. Reading in the Blender manual is not making the DAWN APPEAR :D.  

 

I typically fix this in my graphics program but if there is a setting that I am overlooking I would love to know.

 

Uping the sampling rate doesn't fix this issue and neither does making the margin larger :D. I typically bake at 300 - 400 on a 1024.

 

Thanks.



[Aquila Kytori]

Hi Chic

Ragged = aliasing ?  If you do a Google search for something like:     cycles bake anti-aliasing? you may find this :

 

BeerBaron · 3 months ago

I think the proposal should just be called “Anti-Aliasing for baking in Cycles”, it’s a longstanding issue.

The workaround is to bake at a higher resolution and then downsample the image to the desired resolution.

Example:
You bake at 4096x4096 and then rescale to 1024x1024. This has more or less the same effect as taking 4x4 (=16) Anti-Aliasing samples (if the baker had support for that), assuming your rescale algorithm takes the average of 4x4 pixels to produce 1 pixel (e.g. “Bilinear” or “Bicubic” rescale option in Photoshop).

Also note that if you render e.g. AO maps, you can then reduce your AO samples accordingly to achieve the same level of noise, i.e divide by 4x4 (=16) if you render at 4096x4096 for a 1024x1024 rescaled output.

 

But maybe good news now :

from the Blender Wiki :   https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.77/Cycles

 

Dev:Ref/Release Notes/2.77/Cycles

 

Baking

 

Cycles baking combined pass options

The baking process can now be customized for the combined pass allowing which passes should contribute to the final baking.

We also have more control over the light passes diffuse, glossy, transmission and subsurface. We can bake the direct and/or indirect contributions alone and decide if we want them combined with the surface color, or as contribution weights. (9a76354)

• Anti-Aliasing is now enabled for baking. (c359343)

 

From the screen shot of your Bake Panel it doesn't look like you are using Blender 2.77. Try 2.77 and let us know if it is really working 

[Chic Aeon]

Ahh. Thanks sweetie.

 

Yes I have baked at 4096 and resized but then the things I wanted sharp get less sharp - LOL. Such a PICKY GAL!!!!!

 

I am in 2.75 not the newest and typically don't update instantaneously.  I will search some on the new anti-alias feature and see what I come up with.  I thought maybe there was some setting in that long menu that wasn't the default .   

 

I have noted that even the folks in Maya seem to go for "blurry" textures over crisper ones. I just like  --- my chocolate dark, coffee strong, and textures cripsy with contrast - *wink*.

 

Thanks again. Will report and also bookmark this thread so I don't lose it.

 

Update: here is the page that talks about Anti-alias or oversampling, but I haven't found if this affects BAKING yet.  

https://www.blender.org/manual/render/blender_render/antialiasing.html

 

 Update 2: 

 

Further research and some experimentation (not in 2.77) suggests that the anti-alias doesn't translate into the bake. I tried some suggestions on anti-alias with Gaussian Blur and it had no effect on the bake at all.

 

So hopefully someone knows - LOL.  

 

I did find a SLEW of folks complaining for years .

 

Onward.   

 

PS. I followed your link to the bug reporting form but when I look at this note, it "seems" like there is still an issue even with 2.77.

 



 

but I am SO NOT GOOD at readying JIRA type things so I may have that all wrong.

 

Hopefully in the future anyway! Will watch this thread .