Baking lighting

Hi. I've recently been trying to make baked lighting for like skins using blender and the avatar meshes. how exactly would i do this using blender or should i use another program that can perform this.

Blender can do it just fine, assuming you're not wanting shiny skins (Blender can't bake specularity, as it's a perspective shader)

To do this:

Open up the meshes in Blender (If you need the meshes, separated corrctly, see the Vid description for http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oc5PzK8VpKs&feature=channel_page I've created a .blend with them separated properly into the three template sections. In fact, watch that video, it will tell you most, if not all, of what's in this text tutorial. It's my video, so I wouldn't be surprised if it's exactly the same info)

Now, create a new Material (Materials tab of the Buttons window), and add a new texture to it (Texture tab of Material section). Change the texture type to IMAGE, and load your texture into it (Whichever is the right one for that body part).

Go back to the Material base section, and go to 'Map Input' and change from ORCO to UV. An input box to the right of that is labeled 'UV'. Type 'UVTex' into that field (Case sensitive, I believe).

Your texture should now be properly applied if you render the scene (F12), to show it.

Split the viewport window, and change one side to the UV/Image editor, and add a new image for that body part. (To do this, select the part, and tab into Edit Mode, then click Image in the UV/Image editor, and 'add new'. If you use a 1024 pixel texture, downsize in an image editor to 512. Otherwise, just use a 512 texture)

Set up your lighting, so that you can bake shadows however you really want them, then switch to the Render tab, and find the 'Bake' button (In the Bake subtab, which by default is the Animation tab). Make sure it's on 'Full Render' and click Bake, and it should bake properly!

I also recommend that before you bake, you add a subsurf modifier on every part, level 2 should be fine. This will help smooth the mesh more naturally, and give better results.

If you have any specific questions, feel free to ask, and I, or someone else, will do our best to help!

thanks loads. i managed to make the models into a single piece after about 1 hour of tinkering with blender. I'll post a picture of what i come up with soon.

Unless you're doing some rather advanced (At least compared to joining the mesh) workings, you do NOT want to do that. At all. All clothing and skins in Second Life are arranged according to three separate templates, which are actually just the UV maps for the three separate parts, the Head, Torso, and Legs. If you combine the three sections into one mesh, then you'll have texture sections overlapping, and it will just be a big jumbled mash of textures when you bake, with no single one anywhere near complete. Check a skin in SL, there are three separate texture sections, not just one.

I separated the avatar meshes into those three separate sections for that specific reason, because when making any sort of texture for an avatar, those are the three different sections you work with, and can't really combine in any way without some very careful slider tweaking in SL.

Leaving them separate does no harm, as long as you move them together (You can do this by only selecting either the head or the torso, I forget which, or all three sections). The shadows will still be seamless, especially if in the Bake panel you change 'Margin' to 32, it's maximum. This causes a texture bleed over the seams, to allow a more perfect match when you combine them. The shadows shouldn't end up with a seam in the texture, and everything should look just fine.

Now, depending on how you joined them, it may or may not be possible to continue with that file, you may just want to start over. If you, at any point, literally combined them into one mesh (Easiest way would be to Remove Doubles once they're in one object), then just start over. You don't want to take the time to find the UV map seams, it's pointless when you can just use a premade file like the one I provide for the video tutorial above.

lol. I knew about the 3 sections. I used the dummy several times to preview skins. thanks for the warning tho.

wow. i had no idea you could do this in blender. i've been making skins in GIMP for a couple of years but am only now getting results i'm happy with. Still, being able to bake lighting onto the skin would be a huge huge help.

is there anyway to use blender to help with seams? they continue to kill me.

thanks!
anik

Yes, Blender has the ability to paint directly onto the mesh (Called Vertex Paint mode in Blender), including a 'blur' or 'smear' type brush, which you can use to smooth seams. If you took the time to learn it well enough, you could technically make an entire skin using just Blender, with very good results, using both mesh painting and setting face materials, and shadows. Most people prefer working with 2d-editors for various parts, however.

ETA: More info on it here:

http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:Manual/Materials/Vertex_Paint

Don't ever bake lighting for skins, it doesn't work, the shadows look painted on when the lighting clashes with what your shadows are doing. It just looks like you've smeared dirt on it.

Skin tones yes, lighting - nope.

I've seen some skins with very light baked shadows, that looked wonderful. If done right, and done well, it can look good. Of course, when Shadows come into SL fully, anything with fake shadows will look bad, but that's not happening yet.

What skins are you talking about? I've never seen it done successfully, I've tried it for my partner who hand draws amazing skins and shadows wouldn't work no matter how subtle.

The only thing that works is flesh toned lighting, but the complexity of the mesh lets it down completely.

I really do mean _soft_ shadows. Things like adding a little shadow beneath breasts, or adding a little definition to lips, or crotchal areas. If you feel like doing the work involved, you could also use shadows (Perhaps you'd want them flesh coloured for this, I admit) via a higher poly mesh, by sculpting in tight abs, and using lighting to accentuate that, etc.

Faking any shadows is definitely easier, for skins, as it's easier to be selective, but with enough work, you can definitely get some nice results with proper baking.

I can't name any skins using this off the top of my head, as I only us X2 Gothica skins, which I don't believe have shadows. I have _seen_ it done well, though, rarely.

I'm sorry, but that's hogwash.

Unlike you, I've got a great deal of experience doing this exact type of thing.

Like you, I know how to get the most out of a good lighting rig.

In a static render, it looks fine, in the wild it looks terrible. You can heed my words and save yourself the grief or go ahead and learn from your own mistakes. Shadows don't work - skin toned lighting does.

Never shade with black on a natural looking skin - it's million dollar advice.

I'm afraid I'm with Ponk on this one.

When I made my first skin, I put shadows, very light ones, into it, brought it in world, and tried all the various animations and poses I had.

And found, to my distress, that a lot of them have the avatar in positions where the lighting isn't from directly overhead. Especially the ones that are more intimate, where I would assume that you're really going to want to have a skin that looks good close up.

All the shadows I'd very carefully applied looked like bruises. Which I suppose would be fine if you are into that kind of thing, but I'm guessing most people aren't.

I found myself reducing the opacity of those layers to 1%, and then removing them, and using skin toned lighting; and that was back in the pre-windlight days.

Windlight has made it even more imperative to use skin-toned lighting only.

I'm guessing that the skins you saw that looked good with baked in shadows just happened to be in exactly the right conditions for the baked shadows to match the lighting at that moment in time. When that happens, yeah, they can look wonderful.

But how often is that going to be the case?

Especially remembering that "facelights" don't actually work, given the OpenGL light limitations, and the fact that there is an unsquished bug that keeps most of us from seeing more than the two closest lights (not counting the sun and moon.) So your own face might look good to you, when you cam around and take a look, because you are closest to those lights. But that's not the way everyone else is seeing you.

I highly recommend not baking shadows onto skins. That's my recommendation, which you, of course, are free to heed or ignore.

Hope this helps!

Robin and everyone else thank you for your kind words. I mostly experimented with the idea because i needed a very good and i mean very good way to show the muscle tones of the avatar mesh for a specialized avatar i was making but the process ended disastrously when i discovered that the light baking had left seams from every conjoined object and didn't stich them properly so yeah i'm a bit whoo hoo mad over that little lack of seeing. thankfully i didn't make anything else from those images. Thankfully i now know the baking process in blender works for all textures so i'm in heaven using it for making realistic textures for various objects in a 3D scene i make that might need faked shadow or some kind of surface detail.

well i never thought i'd bump this but now i'm on the point of ripping my hair out.

I've followed Keiras advise on making baking lighting but for some odd reason it won't bake nor accept any texture i use for a sculpty i'm trying to bake. I used the domino import/export plugins for blender. so now i'm assuming the plugins do not create uvmaps automatically for sculpts. so what do i do to make the uv map.