Zbrush baking

I am curious, who bakes here, what do you use and How do you do it.
And does anyone use zbrush and bake there?

I use 3ds Max to bake, either avatars or build textures. For avatars it's simply a matter of setting up some nice lighting and using render to texture to export it to SL's UVs. I'll generally do several passes and then blend them together until I get what I want (which is generally easier than trying to get a lighting solution that looks good from a full 360). For builds (not being a scripter in either max or SL) I'll have both apps open and create individual surfaces in max with the same measurements (in meters) and position, then light it, and bake the individual surfaces for inclusion in a texture sheet. I might set that up in Max with custom UVs or just do it in PS later.

I was going to try and quote some other people's toolsets from memory, but I think I'll let them do it. I lost my short term memory is a tragic Tringo accident when I was young.

Anyone else?

I use 3DS Max.

I could seriously write several chapters on the subject. Not just on baking, but on texturing, lighting, and rendering as they relate to baking. What maps are you going to use? Will you use an environment background and will it interact with the maps? Specular and gloss, or reflection and diffusion? Bump, normal, or displacement with the lighting?

And the questions just keep piling up as you take the journey. Well, if you take the journey as I have. I'm always taking my time to play with every little thing and understanding it. Even the shortest little jaunt can take me months.

You ask, "Bake a texture?"
And I ask, "Ambient occlusion?"

With all of the meandering and fooling around I've been doing lately, I have finally decided on how I will bake textures for SL using 3DS Max. This time around, it only took me two weeks to figure out what I'm happy with.

Paint one colour map for the mesh. Just one map and that's it. Taking it easy, of course, on the hue, sat, and lum variation. You know, keep it slightly lower than pastel and sparingly dip into the higher saturated hues.

Slap that colour map onto the mesh and get busy with the environment.

Start a 2d map and pick some bitmap at random. I've got some stock CDs with a decent variety of photographs to choose from. Can't beat 3000 royalty free photograph on a CD for a mere $5 of off the clearance shelf.

Once I have the bitmap picked, blur it right in the Material Editor using Blur and Bur Offset. Make sure Environment > Spherical is turned on.

Render > Environment and Instance the 2d bitmap in the Material Editor.

Drop in a Skylight and check Use Scene Enironment. No Cast Shadows, no Light Tracer, and no Radiosity. No other lights. Default Scanline is fine.

Give it a test render. If it's not right, like things usually aren't with the first test render, go to the Material Editor, the 2d scene bitmap, and tweak using various things in the Output roll-out. Maybe even tweak the Output > Curves in the colour map of the mesh.

Once you have you base colour map on the mesh, you can tweak right in 3DS Max for a wide variety of baked skins. All you have to do is tweak Output here and there, and change the Environment map. Pretty nice for not having to constantly re-tweak the maps in Photoshop during the test renderings. And decently quick, too (IMHO).

Bake out a bunch, then back to Photoshop for comping, detail work, and what-not.

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Random Tip

Bake out a good ambient occlusion render. Load it up into Self-Illumination, but invert it and tweak using Output > Curves. Use in conjunction with regular lighting tricks. Goes a long way in helping with the crotch and various other close mesh parts.

Abu, I would die for some private lessons or even just a tutorial for making clothing in 3DS Max using the SL models and UV Maps

I have been playing around with zbrush 2 with some mixed results. I have been at it for a few weeks allthough I'm no expert it has been fun as I have used zbrush prior to SL. If I make some more progress I'll post here:

For flat textures zbrush is pretty cool using the variety of 2.5 and 3d brushes available, you can get some neat tileable stuff holding the tilde(~) and scrolling your canvas around keep painting in the middle of the canvas. The workflow is quick and one advantage is you can grab your canvas directly into a texture then export to .psd.

Using the avatar templates I found here from second skin labs has been more of a challenge but I am determined to figure it out.

http://www.secondskinlabs.com/Downloads/downloads2.html

from this post:

/109/de/95024/1.html

tips:
1. import the .ztl object of your choice (male or female grouped) load into tools, draw it on the canvas

2. increase the polycount making the object smoother under tool-->geometry-->divide as much as your pc will allow, too high it take a long time render etc. You may want to save this high poly tool for later use

3. before doing anything else turn on 'edit' then click 'frame' this is one annoying part of zbrush, if you switch tools or start to draw you will loose edit mode for the first tool

4. You should see the ploygroups come up in colored sections, ctrl-shift click on the group you want to focus on to hide the portions of the model you are not working on, if you don't do this step it creates your textures on all sections of the model at the same time, very odd. At this point you may also want to save a copy for later use, av_hipoly_top, av_highpoly_head, av_ highpoly_lower. Turn off 'frame' to hide polys.

5. align the object so the face you want is forwards then use the projection master button to 'drop' the object onto the canvas with only the 'color' and 'fade' option selected. paint away or load photorelistic texture to paint with(make sure you are not adding to the geometry, turn 'Zadd' off)

6. pick up the object with the projection master again, rotate to other side, or quarter turn, drop then paint away again. The projection master is baking your texture every time you pick up.

7. Zbrush will nicely handle any seams using flat colors or images with the projection master fade selected (one tip I read says to have tool-->display properties-->dsmooth set to higher than .01 not sure if this does anything!!). When ready save (export) the tool object, the texture will be saved in .bmp at 1024x1024 format.

8.import into PS, then vertical flip for further modification, pull in chip's or Robin's templates if you like, save as .tga etc....

OK so what about the materials????
This is what zbrush is renound for and where I am still figuring things out.

One option is to do as I am described above, but before export go under texture--> 'crop and fill' which will lay your texture out flat where you can go to town with the various materials, painting possibly using only the 'm' selected for material, not 'mrgb' if you want to keep your first paint job. Some brushes seem to work better than others using this technique. (smudge-bump-deco-fibre-shadingenhancer are good) When ready hit texture-->grab doc --> export (to .psd)

What would make sense is if you could use the projection master to pick up your materials and shading, baking it into your texture while keeping the 3d model in play, well you can.. but this is where I'm stumbling. What I have been getting is strange inconsistent darkening that increase each time I pick up (bake) the model. In order to take the shading in the bake, which is the key element in creating that shiny skin or folded clothing, you need to adjust the lighting and mask over areas (by painting with a flat color) before picking up the object. With some practice I have created a passable skin using this technique, it looks very shiny like I just came out of the pool but it's still choppy (not ready for public consumption, I'm not a perfectionist, just want to avoid harassment from experienced SLers!!!).

Anyway I hope some of this helps. If anyone else is using zbrush I would appreciate it if you let me know, swap experiences etc.

-C

ZBrush works really well with high poly count meshes. Better than Maya, Max, and certainly Poser. I am currently building my own mannequins based on the SL avatars (using the same UVW's) at slightly over one million polys. It's great for adding the details around the ear folds, lips, muscles, etc.

The mannequins I have on my web site that whyroc linked to are there to give people a good starting point with the polygroups properly mapped for the overlaying UVW's. They are ideal for materials baking, where seams stay aligned as long as the orientation of the mannequin is left the same.

Materials/lighting/texture baking in ZBrush is not a seamless one step process by any stretch of the imagination. The lighting is a bit hard to control without numerical entry features, but some custom plugin scripts can make the lighting setup more consistent. Inevitably one must deal with blending several light sources from back, side, front, bottom, and top to achieve a consistent look from all angles. This is a neccessary compromise when dealing with a somewhat static rendering engine such as SL's. I would rather the dynamic lighting in SL was gone completely. It does nothing to help build the illusion of realism in textures applied to the avatars in SL. Instead, SL's lighting reveals a lot of the vertices that a well baked set of textures hide.

Z3 will be out in mid May 2007 and I think we will be dealing with an entirely different application at that point in time. I haven't tested the beta yet, but I have looked at some of the feature previews. A lot of the fussing around that I do in Z2 right now looks like it will be a much smoother process in Z3. It might be a good thing to wait another month and come back to this thread with a fresh perspective.

Thanks, whyroc, that was what I was looking for.

does zbrush allow painting across the uv seams for the 3 uv maps (head, upper, lower body)?

Yes