Creating sculptie textures with blender

I have an issue,and am wondering if anyone else has this problem or a solution to it.

My problem is after creating a UV map for my sculpties, by using UV unwrap>project from view>etc for all faces, I save the resulting image, open it in Photoshop, and add texture. No problem everything works fine.

Now I load this file back into blender. I go thru all the steps to set up the image so I can get a useable image when I upload to SL. But when I go to Render Bake render meshes texture only, the image I created dissappeas and everything goes pink on my image.

Any ideas?

Also, how does everyone else go about making custom sculptie textures?

Thank you,
Quincy Ultsch

Hi maybe i can help.. it seems like you may be overcomplicating the workflow.. typically to start I would bake a simple material or ambient occlusion using the same UV layout as for the sculpt map creation (don't unwrap it again). Take this image into photshop for touch up.. from this point on preview only in Blender.

You can also use multiple UV maps to bring in the texture for futher baking which can be complicated, and the resulting texture map will have to be based on the same UV as the sculpt map anyway so to me this method is only useful in certain situations.


An easier way I find is to take the baked and touched up image, load it into a texture ---> in a material, change the mapping for the texture to UV instead of original coordinates (always the square map). This will project the texture onto your object and you can layer other textures, or even go into the nodes with it for mulitple materials. Then you need to create a new image for the UV and bake to get essentially what is a second pass.

Another possiblilty is to assign faces to a group and then a material, now you can have several materials baking on the same UV at the same time, this is suitable for straight lines in your texture as it will follow the mesh/uvs.

I know this is not going to tell you how to do it exactly but hopefully it presents some options for texturing in Blender.


-why

I've made some recent changes to the sculptie scripts for Blender which do give a defined workflow for texturing.

With an existing model, rename the sculptie map uv ("UVTex" unless you've changed it already) to "sculptie". Add-Mesh-Sculpt Mesh does this step automatically on new sculpties.

Then add a new UV Layer (which should be a new "UVTex". You should make this layer active and set it as the rendering texture. Create a new image (say 512 x 512) and assign it ( on multires level 1 ) to the "UVTex" UV faces.

If you are working with image remapping then you should add new UV Layers and rename them to ref_Something.. The layer name is less important here as the scripts will ignore anything but the "sculptie", "UVTex" and "UVTex.0??" layers. Anything that identifies the purpose of the map to you should be fine. These "ref_s" are the only layers that you can do new unwraps on to match source images.

As far as your problem, you have assigned the "ref_painted-image" to be the rendering UV texture, so the bake result is overwriting the reference image. If you setup as described above, the "UVTex" layer should be the one the render goes to, so the result would be on the new 512 x 512 image created.