Blender light/shadow baking too pixelated

Hello guys,

Blender 2.48, sculpt mesh, created the object, did set the lamps so my object has the shadows and lights. Now - i am trying to render all of them into the 512x512 using Full Render.

Problem which i cannot solve is: the lights and shadows in the output texture turn out to be very pixelated. This however doesnt happen when i use Ambient Occlusion render.. The only solution so far which worked was to Add Multires (with Catmull-Clark) for the object, however that smoothes the object which is not good in most cases.

Question: What can be the reason for this and how to get smooth lights and shadows?


Thank you!

Did you set smooth on the mesh?

Also adding a subsurf modifer and an edge split modifier (if you have sharp corners) can improve texture baking.

Smoothing, you mean the Edit mode -> Mesh Tools -> Smooth? This definetly doesnt help. In the UV view it seems that light/shadow pixelisation is done by the size of the UV. squares.

TY

Subsurf modifier did the trick.
Smoothing modifier in my case had nothing to do with the pixelation.
Edge split - same as smoothing, didnt change much.

So I guess that's the answer!?
Anything else to keep in mind during the baking?

No, as in "Set Smooth" and it's opposite (the default) "Set Solid" in the "Links and Materials" buttons panel.

allright, thank you very much for the help.

by the way, how the Blender script development is doing? when will we be able to export multiple objects into SL and they will preserve the relative locations and rotations to each other? That would be a great step forward!

The export LSL option does this. The exported script checks whether it is the root prim, if not it applies the offset. Just make sure your root prim is at 0,0,0 in Blender and link the prims before adding the script and sculpt map to their contents. There's still a bug or two that affects some cases, but for straight sculpties (not using keep center or scale) it should work fine.

I am going to do a single script version but I'm busy with paid work at the moment and I'm having to limit my computer time due to carpal tunnel problems. So I'm not sure when I'll get some more quality time on the scripts. I'll be going to doctors again early next week to find out whether physio, steroid injections or surgery is needed. I suspect surgery in which case it'll take a month for my wrist to recover

Oh, wish you soon recovery, thumbs up!

Do you get little black squares and such? I just used teh gimp dialate and erode functions, I can't remember which one. But one of those, in Gimps Filter>Generic menu will sometimes get rid of those. If you replace the image with a 512X512 one from the c: drive that can work to get a truye 512, if you haven't got if working yet. I stumple my way thorugh this program sometimes, it has so many options and an odd interface.

BTW, I hope you recover well from carpel tunnel syndrome. That stuff has taken many hours and weks or even years out of peoles lives.

I wish I could help out with the scripts, but not to many people know enough 3D stuff and python to figure it all out I bet. Me included. Iw il have ot wait for paypal to help the other way!

In my opinion Blender does not have the best renderer. What alot of blender users do is direct
their render output to the excellent open source renderer POV RAY.

POV RAY

It does actual high quality ray tracing.

Hello Maris,

In the above post I was remembering that there were other higher quality rendering options
out there that are also open source.
And I mistakenly quoted POVRAY as one of the main ones. What I should have said was YAFRAY.
As that one has a built in pointer to it from within blender. Raytracing programs can yield spectacular results but are sometime slower.

Yafray

My mistake, apologies for any time wasted on this pointer.

I read today that there have been many improvements to the internal blender renderer. So
getting back to your original questions. You can try increasing the size of your render in Blender
if you are not already doing so.
Also there is something called OSA.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/OSA

Which is how Blender apparently refers to antialiasing.

Both yafray and povray are external renderers, possibly yafray
acts like a plugin but I am not sure.
I used to use POVRAY to get better more realistic renders from wings, daz and poser scenes.
Using a really cool program called Poseray.
Poseray

Also this thread was sort of interesting.
http://blenderunderground.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=1129

Also another open source renderer.
http://www.luxrender.net

As it turns out rendering to Povray is not as common as I thought
and is actually rather difficult. However it is done, here is a link to some info on that.
http://www.irtc.org/pipermail/irtc-l/2002-October/011687.html

So to sum up, I suggest that your immediate challenges can be most easily solved from
within blender. And that you can make some finer adjustments in the blender render settings.
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Blender_3D:_Noob_to_Pro/Render_Settings

Blender tutorials are probably your best bet for now. However you can also get more info
on the external renderers from their respective sites.
Sorry for the misquote.

Good Luck