How to Bake Clothing in MAYA

I was wondering if anyone could give me a step by step on how to bake clothing in MAYA 8.5
(pretty please Chosen Few!)

I am a little stuck with the whole lighting set up etc... well the whole texturing side of things has got me beat lol

This is a big question, Jonathan. It's not quite as simple as "follow these 10 steps to perfect clothing every time." There are many factors to consider, all of which will be significantly variable, depending on what you want to do.

For example, how do you want to make the actual clothing item itself? Do you want to paint the basic garment in Photoshop, and then use Maya just to bake light and shadow onto it, or do you want to create the entire thing from scratch in Maya? Further, would you prefer to work with procedures, or with painted maps, or a combination of the two?

And how do you want things to be lit? Do you want to shine a bunch of spotlights, to give things a harsh, stage-lighting kind of look, or would you rather make the light more even, like how everything looks on an overcast day? (Keep in mind, by the way, that much of the conventional wisdom regarding 'how to light a scene' is not well applicable to baking. Usually lighting schemes are designed with one camera's point of view in mind. When something is baked, it has to look good from all angles, so you have to take that into account in your lighting. There can be no such thing as back-lighting, for example, if there's no "back".)

Also, what renderer are you using? That makes a huge difference. The two that come with Maya are the Maya software renderer and Mental Ray. If that's all you've got, then you're probably gonna want to use Mental Ray most of the time. The Maya software renderer is kind of weak. I primarily use a third party renderer called Turtle, which is the only renderer on the market designed specifically for baking (among other things). Other renderers can do the job, of course, but Turtle yields much better results much faster, and with far less setup needed since it puts just about everything you need all in one place. (You don't even necessarily need lights in your scene with Turtle, if you can imagine that!)


All in all, pick a random number between 2 and 2 million, and that's probably how many different ways you could do this. So it's not quite possible to just spit out one list of steps, and have it be applicable to whatever you specifically might be trying to do. Learning these things comes with time and practice.

Rather than asking for a list of steps, I'd suggest you invest in a good book on lighting and texturing in Maya, so you can well learn the concepts involved. I know that's not the answer you wanted, but really, it's the best way to go. If you have a firm grasp of the concepts, the steps will take care of themselves (with some practice, of course). But if the ONLY thing you know is one list of steps, you won't understand the concepts, and then you'll need a whole new list again every time you want to do something a little different.

If I can come up with a generic tutorial that I think will suit people's clothing-making needs with much universality, I'll post it. It's something I've been thinking about for a long time, actually. But to be universally applicable, it would need to contain so much information, it could practically be a book. It's hard to figure out how to summarize on something like this and still make it broad enough to cover all the bases.

Hi Chosen ,

I am looking to create more shadow and depth into my 2D template from Photoshop

I guess the question is very similar to this thread:
How to bake clothing in 3d Max

/109/b5/70851/1.html

Thanks for the speedy reply!

If all you want to know how to do is to instruct Maya to bake a texture, not how to do lighting or how to actually make the texture itself, there are a million tutorials all over the Web for that. Here's one I just found via Google: http://fromthehill.nl/tutorials/bake/index.html

You should have no trouble applying the same procedure to the avatar mannequin.

The only thing it doesn't cover is how to apply your clothing image from Photoshop to the color channel of the material you're using. There are several ways to do that. The simplest one to explain here is to open the material in the attribute editor, and next to where it says Color, click the little checkerboard button at the right. The Create Render Node dialog will open. On the Texure tab, under 2D textures, click File, and then simply select your clothing texture image file. The color of the material will change to display the colors of image, effectively turning the image into the material's texture.

Thanks Ignite, thats what i should of said lol.
Thanks Chosen will check it out