Texture Baking in Lightwave

Hello!

I've recently be interested in baking lighting to the avatar mesh via a few programs. Maya is a bit complex, and the lighting doesn't seem as smooth as lightwave on the SL avatar. I've been following this tutorial by Nephilaine of PixelDolls, it's a bit old but still very informative: http://www.nafii.com/PixelDolls/?p=87

I'm sure many of you that design and use texture baking have seen this already, and it's probably just old news. But apart from (re)submitting this to the forums, I've also got a question that I know a few people would like answered (directed at current users of Lightwave):

In this tutorial, there is a avatar mesh included is all fixed up and ready to go for baking. One small problem though, it's female! My wife really appreciates this, but I'm the one that designs the male clothing in our household If anyone would have any clue as to how to switch this to a male shape, I'd gladly kiss your feet. Also, not sure if this helps, but when I go to mess with the surfaces/textures, there ARE surfaces for Male Head/Upper/Lower/Skirt. I'm not that great with LightWave so if anyone can point me to the direction as to how to show and work with these instead of the female shapes, I'd be EXTREMELY happy.

(PS - at the top of the Surface Editor it says "Objects: 1, Surfaces: 8". 4 female, 4 male. Maybe I'm just missing something here.)

Hey all. My apologies for necroing an old thread, but this was posted with the exact question I have. Can anyone shed some light on this?

Thank you!

The parts are all there on separate layers ... I am no expert in Lightwave and never did figure out how to switch between the different layers in Layout. What I ended up doing is opening the file in Modeler, finding the layer for the male avatar and deleting the others and then resaving as a separate file to open and bake in Layout. I did the same thing with the female and male skirt layers. Hope that helps!

It DOES! Thank you !!

ok so I got the info placed correctly and put my clothing image on the mesh. Now I have another roadblock! The images looks great on the model, have lights and specularity. The problem is when I use the Surface baker plugin to render to image it gives me an error saying when the render completes saying,

" Nothing was baked. Only faces with 3 or 4 vertices can be be baked. All other faces were ignored "

So what setting do I have have wrong?

hmmm... I don't know. I've never gotten that message. Hopefully, someone else here has the answer. Was it baking fine with the original female avatar file? If that one was baking ok, I can try putting up the male and skirt files I separated out, so you can download them to try.

I would appreciate that. I only make Male clothes so the Female avi is not my main focus. I would be interested to try those male only files.

again thank you for your help

in the surface baker properties did you select the uv map?
and set the image type
oh wait
you said "Only faces with 3 or 4 vertices can be be baked"
you could try checking your uvmap polygons make sure they are 3 and 4 vertices

You're welcome, Rylan. I uploaded the files to Box.net for you to try:

http://www.box.net/shared/dmjg96tfen

You might find these Lightwave tutorials interesting too.

http://www.newtek.com/lightwave/tutorials.php

If you scroll down, there is one on the Surface Baking Camera rather than using the shader that I've been playing with.

Thank you so much for providing these files! I had been pulling my hair about it too!

Holy buckets Betty!! That texture baking camera is THE BOMB ! LOL Thanks for all the help on this! Your the best!

You're both very welcome!