Baked Textures

Hi folks!

I have made the jump to baking my clothing textures -- everything is working peachy keen except for one thing -- the seams. Since Lightwave cuts off the edges RIGHT AT THE EDGE, there is a discernable mark on the seams when uploaded to SL. How can I fix this? I have tried to make the background color the same as the baked texture, but it's not perfect, and you can still see quite clearly the edges.

So, is there some sort of Photoshop trick that can extend the edges? Thanks for any help

Probably not necessary part of advice, but bake just the illumination, with the material of your items set to mix of luminosity and lower diffuse, with anti-alias and shading noise reduction enabled... this still leaves seams, but reduces them a lot. (you can apply this map over regular colour map in multiply mode, or whatever)

To extend edges of map baked this way, look up "Flaming Pear" ... they provide set of free Photoshop plugins ( http://www.flamingpear.com/goodies.html ) ... the one named "Solidify" is what you need.

hope this helps ^^

Right on, works perfectly, thanks

hi Lo!
are you using the Surface Baker shader, or the Microwave pixel filter for your baking?

I would reccomend Microwave. It has a setting where you can have it take the pixels at the UV edge and push them out X pixels, which will take care of that black-seam issue. (Expand is the name of this field in the menu)

Also, Microwave seems to be a lot faster for me when testing.

here's the menu youre looking for, and some reccomended settings: (sorry, big image)

i know the rtt from max8 do the edge bleeding

Also, Microwave is commercial plugin which costs $499 i.e. about as much as Lightwave itself... ^^;;;

Hey Neph I do have MicroWave and that screenshot will be extremely helpful to me -- I have zero experience with 3D programs

I was surprised that Lightwave took so long to bake things. I haven't wrangled MicroWave into behaving, but I'll tinker around and try your settings -- thanks

OK I have been making clothes for almost 2 years in photoshop, have never used lightwave... what does "baked textures" do?

It's used to make clothing to keep avatars warm

Or, it means including all the light&shadow information from the rendered scene into the textures, so that when you put those textures on avatars/prims in SL, they will look like the rendered screne (more or less)

You can basically model cloth wrinkles and such in Lightwave, which is 3d model/render program like Maya or 3d Max... 'baking' then records information about lighting and shading of such wrinkles, and you can then add this easily in Photoshop to your regular cloth textures making them appear more real. You can also simulate more advanced lighting effects this way, like iridescent surfaces or coloured lights, which are otherwise hard to get right.

Simpler version is skip the wrinkles modelling etc and just record info about how the shades and highlights would appear on your AV. I've used that when making my skins e.g. ... you can see it in shade the head casts on upper part of neck, and such.

I've never been able to get the edge bleed to work well in Max. I ended up editing the UVW's and pulling all the edge verts out a couple of pixels. Worked like a charm.

well i dunno but at least in max 8 it work by itself

No real reasoning behind baking textures in SL aside from shading patterns which you can do as a go between from 3ds max or anything like that that can render in 3d including Poser =P. Just need to shade it in Photoshop by guessing its more work sure but its most likely the cheapest way to do it hehe. I know i wouldnt want wrinkly looking clothing in SL really lol. Might look more natural but bah.

I have a question about baking in Maya. After baking, I find up to 10 images that have been exported. Is this normal? If now, how can I have it export one texture file? Thanks!

i would say,better to learn the basics of the tool, it sound like you are rendering 10 frames instead of one

Wouldn't surprise me. I set my current baking system up in max 6 and even then it was likely a case of me not RTFM.