Render to Texture (Baking): What do you use?

Do you use something other than 3ds or Maya to bake textures (aka render to texture)? That is, exporting the texture map with baked-in lighting and shading?

I had read that this feature was a given for 3d modelers but it doesn't look to be the case. Blender just recently got this feature, and I spent two weeks learning Blender only to find that its texture baking has serious flaws. I'm not amused.

The least expensive program that I found that has a well-regarded (or even well-described) render-to-texture feature is Lightwave ($500 if you have photoshop or a competing 3d app, $900 if you don't). Since I have no more time to spare this seemed like a safe bet, so this is what I ordered.

Rumor has it that Carrara has this capability, but I can find no info. Right now Carrara is on sale for half off ($275 for the pro version) with a free upgrade to 6 when it comes out. Still, no info, and I'm out of time. Anyone use this for texture baking?

Someone here is using Modo and that apparently has the feature. That's a $900 program.

You can approximately almost maybe with great pain do this in Zbrush 2. Zbrush 3 may be better, but once again, I have no info indicating that's the case. Anyone using it for texture baking?

Anything else?

Of course 3ds and Maya do it, at too high a price.

What are the serious flaws in Blenders texture baking? I've not come across them and as far as I can tell there are no open bug reports related to baking.

I use Maya with the Turtle renderer, but as you said, it's expensive.

For inexpensive software, it sounds like you're on the right track. Lightwave is a great program, and we just so happen to have one of the world's experts on it as a regular on these forums, Robin Sojourner. She actually wrote the manual for Lightwave 8.

I get E-mails from DAZ all the time about Carrerra. I've never tried it, but the sample renders they show for it look pretty good. If you're curious, download the demo and give it a whirl.

Same for Z-Brush 3. I haven't had time to play with it, but everything I've seen of it looks impressive. Again, check out the demo. That'll give you a better idea than anything we could say here.

Totally agree, see blender materials, lighting and material nodes.

sticking up for blender here!

-whyroc

1) "Set Smooth" is not reflected in the texture render, though it is in the 3d render.

2) Subsurf results in square pieces missing from the texture render. Looks like large, square black pixels. The higher the level of subsurf the smaller they get, but they don't go away entirely.

It looks like Ambient Occlusion isn't being run to completion in the "Full Render". If you select just Ambient Occlusion it takes much longer to complete, and does so without leaving holes, though the result is still very grainy. "Full Render" runs way too quickly, and leaves holes.

3) It looks like the normals for some surfaces are flipped. This results in triangular dark spots on the texture render. This is not a problem on the 3d render. Flipping individual normals does nothing. Flipping all normals "out" does not fix the problem, and turns whole sections of the object that were previously correct "inside out".

Here's a couple blender pictures. The model I'm working with today shows only one triangular piece missing from the baked texture. I could be convinced it was a shadow except that yesterday there was a pattern of missing triangles covering much of the object, as if half of every rectangular face was unrendered.

Anyway, the first image is a 3d render of an avatar. The shadow under the armpit is real. It's not a problem. But note the seams between the body parts: upper and lower arm, hand, shoulder, torso, stomach. I can't figure out how to get rid of them. The grey section has been merged into one object, its material deleted and a new one added, and this is "set smooth" and subsurfed. Still...seams. As if the different sections are made of a slightly different material.

The second image is the highest quality baked texture I've seen from blender. Note the banded graininess, and the seams are even more apparent. There's only one triangular piece missing, as I noted above. On this model I'm not seeing rectagular bits missing as a result of subsurfing. I'll try to get a picture of that. It looks like 1980's-level monochromatic bitmaping.

Me too, for anything but the most basic geometric models

.

Ok. There's a few steps I think you have missed. Here's a quick guide on how to setup the avatar mesh from scratch for baking textures like that.

Import the obj file.

In object mode select the upper torso parts and both arms, hands. Press Ctrl-J to join.

Go to Edit mode and press w then 6 to remove doubles (this gets rid of the seams you are seeing)

Add a subsurf modifier with the default values.

Add a smooth modifier with the default values.

Go to the materials tab and select the world. In the panels select the "Amb Occ" tab and turn on ambient occlusion. I use Samples=8, Random, Both, Plain

Go to UV Face Select mode and make sure all faces are selected

Go to UV Image Editor and from the menu select Image - New Image. I used 512 x 512 for this example.

Go to Scene buttons, select Bake panel, Ambient Occlusion and hit the Bake button

You should get an image to save that looks something like the attached.

Once you have applied whatever materials you want to the model, Bake "Textures" instead of Ambient Occlusion and save that. Load both images in a graphics editor and set the AO layer as an overlay (fill the black background with 50% grey). This gives a texture with no lighting which is generally preferrable for use in a 3D engine.

You can use Full Render if you have lit the model in Blender, but this will give shading that won't always look right in world.

I tried this with 1) the download avatars and 2) one I modified in Poser and 3) a CS3 avatar by Robin S.. Select the torso pieces plus one arm, join them, remove doubles. In all cases I am told there are zero vertices removed. In all cases I am seeing seams on the avatar.

Edit: I figured out why this is. The object is de-selected when switching to edit mode. Duh! Select all the vertices in edit mode, then remove doubles. 170 vertices deleted. This looks promising.



Indeed, I haven't been turning this on.



I do. It's very grainy. I can't appreciably change this by altering the AO settings, including not using "random". I'm not sure how I'd use this render. If you blur the AO overlay layer in a 2D paint program the blur isn't carried over the seams of the template, so you get different shades on the sides of the template seams, instroducing more seams.



This is the objective. However, even over the graininess of the AO I still see seams. Please see attached.

Edit: The seams go away when duplicate vertices are removed. Other than a couple unexplained lumps in the render, a couple broken faces in the model, and its refusal to be lit from the rear, I'm getting decent renders with AO turned off. I'm researching now if that can be improved.

Thanks for you help.

I changed my post to join both arms, it avoids the problem on the arm seam that you can see on your render.

Actually it might not be essential to turn on AO. I do it to alter the settings to get a better looking map. I combine the renders externally to blender and blur there to lose the grain, but I've not done clothing so the seams weren't an issue. If you want to do it all in Blender, there are suggested settings for using the AO map here :
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Manual/Render_Bake#Refining_the_Ambient_Occlusion_Image

The seams still look like duplicate vertices to me. You can check by moving one of the vertex where the seam appears, if a crack appears in the mesh you still have two mesh sections together rather than one continous one. If so, make sure all vertices are selected and try the remove doubles again.

I changed my post to indicate I had figured this out. I wasn't selecting any vertices

Thanks again for your help. I'll take a look at the AO info on the render to texture page you posted.

My next problem is that the specularity controls in the shaders tab don't affect the rendered texture. Note sure if they should as this is an angle-of-viewing thing. The problem I'm trying to solve is the satiny reflection I get. I can reduce the reflectivity only so much.

I have this demo and can not see a render-to-texture feature in the UI or the manual. I think I might be missing it only because I saw someone mention it as I was gogling, but I can not find the feature in the program.



As far as I know there is not currently a demo available. They will release a demo with the 3.1 update.

for now until i get good with sculpties I am sticking with blender but having waded through all the info and programs and such I decided on lightwave as it seems popular among the clothing designers in SL and its not mind blowingly expensive and i saw it has a plugin for nurbs

Had tossed around zbrush and a couple others but this lightwave seems to be the best option. I can't see myself paying for maya complete when it wont do the texturing and then having to pay more money or buy maya unlimited to texture the sculpty made in maya complete seems to me lightwave is probably the best bet.

Plus looks really good for more effects on clothing so probaby blow a wad on that sooner or later. I'm kind of disappointed to see the grainy textures from blender (hadn't gotten that far yet with it) so i guess for now for me its uvmapper and photoshop and blender

I haven't posted an updated picture, but without AO the render is not grainy. And the banding I saw was because I had the UV window zoomed. I'm still not happy with it (I can't get rid of some lines that I believe are a reflection, and there's some irregularity in the shading), but it's much better than what I've already posted.

For awhile I used Render Man Pixie and a shader from the RM SL Repository. It was a real pain to set up, but wicked quality and speed. I don't think I have the strength for it anymore.
igh:

Reading this thread brought up some questions in my mind, so during a search I
found this link on ambient occlusion in Blender.

http://feeblemind.tuxfamily.org/dotclear/index.php/2005/01/16/10-didacticiel-locclusion-ambiante---tutorial-ambient-occlusion

It looks pretty informative, I scanned it quickly however I did notice it mention a reason for the banding.

Also thanks for the mention of the Renderman Pixie Abu, now I have a bunch of pages open
relating to everything renderman, lol.