Using 3D Studio Max to Bake Clothing Textures

How?

How?

How?

Where do I start? What do I do? If someone could walk me through it, it would be FANTASTIC.

Thank you

... is it even possible?

Or do I need something like Lightwave?

I dont think you wnat to do this at all.

As far as I understand (could be wrong), "Baking" in the sense that it's usually used here is like applying the shading as if there is a hypothetical light source illuminating the object. Best example is the floor of Aimee's club which has pools of light etc.

This generally is only a good technique for flat surfaces in my experience (like walls and floors). If you do it on clothes, the shadows tend to just look like grey stains more of the time. On clothes, you just want the texture of the draping of the fabric and that only very slightly done. Minimal shading and the majority of the texture being the fabric itself, not modelling on the fabric.

Maybe you're right, but I'd like to tinker around with it anyway. I'm just trying to play with effects

Baking lighting on clothing and skin textures can be a great way to enhance shadows, give the illusion of different types of fabric, or simulate shiny materials. You could apply bumps, reflections, 3D textures, etc. instantly rather than spending the hours upon hours necessary to convicingly create those effects in Photoshop.

I'm not a Max whiz, so I can't give you the exact commands (I'm primarily a Maya user), but let me give you the basic concept. Grab the avatar models from the downloads page. Open the OBJ files in Max. Apply the clothing textures you'd like to bake.

Now, if you were using Maya, the next step would be really simple, but it may be slightly more complicated in Max. Maya can bake lighting and output the shading directly back to the 2D template, but I'm not sure if Max can or not. If it can, then that's all you need to do and you're done. If it can't then what you want to do is render a few orthographic shots from in front and from behind. Open the rendered images in Photoshop and then stretch and distort them to fit the templates.

This is very possible with 3DS. I've gotten close but i think i know what my problem was. If i figure it out, i'll post a short how-to with some precise points.

ahem...hours later i say just use Lightwave. At least there is some evidence that it's possible with lightwave. All i can get out of 3Ds is a complete mess.

Hahaha ok thanks everyone

Given that Max has been such a standard within the realtime community, I'd guess that baking the textures in is as easy as doing it in Maya. You might want to check out the forums at either CGTalk or CGChat. Those two sites would be my first stop.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/

http://www.cgchat.com/forum/

I'm with Chosen on this. I'm a Maya girl. The initial learning curve is daunting, but once you commit the time and effort to get up to speed it seems like there isn't anything you can't do. I have been ramping up on Maya Cloth so the next generation of *PREEN* clothing will all be rendered. The results can be really spectacular.

Cool, Aimee. Can't wait to see what you come up with. I'm sure it'll be spectatcular.

By the way, if you have Maya 6 or higher, you might want to play around with hair if you haven't already. Not only can you use it for the obvious (hair), but you can also make pseudo cloth with it that can be a bit easier to manipulate for certain things than real cloth is. You can get some really interesting wrinkles, twists, and drapes with it. Create some hairs, and then use them as control curves for a lofted surface. Turn on dynamic playback and toss the hairs around. It can yield some really cool results, and if nothing else, it's just plain fun to pick things up and throw them around the screen.

baking to a texture in 3ds is fairly simple, it's getting a texture out of it that you can do anything with that i had trouble with. granted, i completely suck with 3Ds there are so many things you can control that it becomes daunting and you don't know what to leave alone or change.

Has anyone tried Blender? It's Free ya know.
http://www.blender.org/cms/Home.2.0.html

googled baking texture with blender, found this. (actually, since blender is free, i might give this a try, since i have wanted to try and bake texture for stuff in SL. Will post with my success when i get around to it )



As for 3D Studio Max, what i have found out, is a tool called Texporter for 3DS Max.(tutorial here). Dont have 3D Studio Max, so cant test it out, sorry :/

wow, im good when i cant sleep .

thanks gattz

I downloaded the texporter plug-in, installed it, whatever. Honestly i'm a total noob at 3Ds, so i don't even know if i used the plug-in for this, but i DID get some useable results.

The following is a brief overview of my bumbling procedure.

Firstly start a new 3DS file and import your SL model. (http://secondlife.com/downloads/avatar.php)

Select the model and add the modifier "Mesh Smooth" to the entire model. Leaving it at it's default settings seems to work fine.

Next apply a texture (not actually necessary...you can export a dull grey map if you want). If you need details on how to do this i'll post it, but right now it's 5:30am and i have to work in 2 hours

NEXT..and this is the important bit...select the entire model (it's in 5 sections, hold ctrl and select each bit or just drag select the whole thing). Go to Rendering > Render to Texture.

Expand the "Objects to Bake" section (if it isn't already). You should see a list of all the parts of your model. Below that there is a setting for "padding" i previously overlooked this and had it set to 2, but i think 0 might actually be best. Further down you'll see "Mapping Coordinates". Set this to "Use existing channel".

Now expand the "Output" section. click the "Add" button and select only "Complete Map" from the dialog and press ok. You'll see a few buttons to select image size, 512 being the ideal SL size (but 1024 if you intend to edit further, as it gives you more details to work with).

Lastly, expand the "General Settings" section and select an output location (otherwise it just goes into a folder in the 3ds directory). Now click "Render" at the bottom left of the screen.

You'll get a message about certain files not having targets. As far as i can tell this doesn't seem to matter, so i just choose to continue anyways. If anyone knows better....feel free to expound. Your textures will show on screen as they render.

NOW...

this is still not perfect. alot of my tga files seem to have odd artifacts on them, and the model can cast some strange shadows at it's mesh seams despite smoothing. Right now the only way i can see to fix this is just smudge it out in PS.

so anyway, it's a start and thanks again gattz

(i'm way too tired to proof read this post, so if it's jibberish i apologize)

i just want to point an important thing while some start seeing baking as the holy grail of clothing, baking is the final step of the operation, in itself its nothing, but behind this you will have to create a proper lightning and materials wich is easier to say than yo do.

Definately Kyrah. Baking a shiny blob wouldn't get you very far.

If you photosource, baking usually isn't necessary since the photos will already have highlights and shadows. If you paint from scratch it can be very useful, particularly if you use normal maps to add additional detail. I did a full body normal map that adds more anatomical detail than exists on the SL avatar mesh and I often use it to bake additional details into skins and clothing. Another very useful thing you can do is to create your own UV mapping on a seperate UV channel for problem areas like the shoulders and waist seam. You can create your textures using your custom mapping and then use render to texture to bake it back to SL's UV templates. This is really useful even if you're not baking in any lighting (using a fully self illuminated material). I do that quite a bit.

If you're interested in doing baking in max, there aren't really any shortcuts. You'll need to have a good working knowledge of max. Read up on the material editor, lighting tools, UV mapping, normal maps, and render to texture. Once you have some more specific questions it'll be easier to help you

*long sigh* playing around with Blender, and i was able to calculate the radiosity stuff onto the SL Avatar mesh, but ended up screwing it up there. So I decided to start basic, and just have a cube room, with a another smaller cube inside, and a light source. But, all i get when calculating the radiosity stuff is a black room and yet i followed the tutorial :/

But it can be Done!

Gattz, I've never played with Blender, but I can take a guess at what problem you might be having... polygons, by default, are not double sided. Each poly has what's known as a "surface normal" that determines the direction from which the poly wil render as a solid triangle. If you view a polygon from the opposite side of its "normal" it will be invisible. By default, surface normals point away from the center of the object. If you're making a big cube to be the room then you'll need to flip it's surface normals so they point towards the center of the cube instead of away from it. Otherwise you've viewing the back sides of the polygons and seeing right through them.

I looked at this idea in Lightwave yesterday. I found the main problem to be the low resolution of the SL manequin causes odd artifacts in the lighting. I could probably fix that with some effort in the modeler. But what I did find was this is a great technique for getting the initial shading on the skin. Especially for the face. I probably wouldnt have thought about doing this at all if it hadnt been mentioned here. Thanks !

I'm not sure about Lightwave, but I've found that in Maya, if you convert the model from polys to subdivs it gernerally yields better resuts. The UV's remain the same since sibdivs are controlled by the polys they came from, but the smooth curves allow for much better gradations in lighting.

If subdivs don't work out in lightwave, you could always just increase the poly count on the model.

I do this in max also. I convert the av model to a subdiv surface and quadruple the number of polys. It's useful for baking, but I find it's not particularly useful for 3d painting.