baked shadows?

Hey guys, I'm looking for a lil help regarding baked shadows in SL.
How do you make those? I'm not asking for any software tutorial, just for the tools you use.
I've read about blender, maya, wings,sketchup, which one do you use, do you build in SL then export your models to bake your shadows outta sl, do you build offline in whatever 3d soft?
Even if I consider using baked shadows for furnitures, my main concern atm is for buildings.

Thanks for your answers!

3D Max + Vray Lighting Plugin -> Render to texture -> Profit

Edit: Uploaded some screens of a quick demo.

http://tinyurl.com/5s4shu

Primarily I use Photoshop for 2D and Maya with the Turtle renderer for 3D. Whether I'll create the shading in Photoshop or Maya depends on the project.


Sketchup will be useless for this. It doesn't do rendering. If you wanted to use it at all, you'd need to export your model to a different program to do your baking. And if you're gonna do that anyway, you might as well use a better modeler the whole way through.

Wings likewise does not do rendering. So strictly speaking, it's not directly useful for creating baked textures (or ANY textures) However, it is a much better modeler than Sketchup, so in that sense it is more useful.

Blender and Maya both can do the job from start to finish. So if you're looking for a full-powered 3D application, they're both good choices. Blender suffers from a disfiguring cancer of the interface, but if you can get past that, it's a fine program, and it's free. Maya is one of the best and most powerful programs ever written for any purpose, capable of doing almost anything you can think of, but it is of course expensive.


If you're talking sculpties, then I'll do the modeling in Maya, the texturing with a combination of Photoshop and Maya, and the baking with Turtle.

If it's anything involving regular prims, then I'll build directly in SL. The texturing (including shading), I'll do either in Photoshop, Maya, or a combination of the two. It all depends on the needs of the specific project. In most cases, Photoshop gets the lions share of the work.

.... -> ???????? -> ...... (^_^)

Some of my 3D textures I build a model in 3D and render it in DAZ Studio, Bryce or Carerra. I use DAZ Studio a lot for my window textures. For other 3D effects I will hand-paint the shadows in Photoshop. And recently I did some nice 3D stair railing parts by modeling it out of prims in SL, making it pretty big, and doing a snapshot to disk to eliminate the background.

But also requires quite specific hardware if I remember from when I used it at work. Although it is an excellent piece of software.

Nah, it'll work on just about any computer made in the last few years. Of course just like anything else, the more complicated your scene gets, and/or the more complicated actions you're trying to perform, the more powerful hardware you'll need. It's a bit like gaming in that sense. If you want mad FPS, ability to crunch tons of polygons and textures at once, etc., then you want high end hardware. If you're planning on using it more modestly, then mid level hardware is fine. I'd just stay away from crap like integrated graphics and such. But that's equally true whether you ever touch Maya or not.

That said, workstation hardware is what's recommended for Maya, mostly because it is more stable than typical desktop hardware, and because workstation video cards are often more configurable for certain industry-specific needs than are consumer grade video cards. But that doesn't mean consumer desktop hardware won't work. It works just fine.

Under low load conditions, my 5 year old mid-level (for its day) Dell runs Maya just as well as my 1 year old ultra high end gaming rig.

V-Ray is a renderer with versions for 3ds Max, Maya, and other apps. It has a host of excellent features for advanced lighting and rendering effects like several different types of global illumination (which simulates the way light bounces off materials), advanced reflection and refraction, a physical sunlight and camera system allowing exposure control as if you were using film (with settings for f-stop, shutter speed, film speed, etc), and many other great features. I've been using it for many years now and it's by far my favorite renderer. It's much easier to use and much faster than Mental Ray and other competing renderers.

It's also absolutely not necessary for baking good textures out of Max. Max is a good tool for texture baking right out of the box. For extreme realism Max plus V-Ray is a very good set of tools, though also very expensive. V-Ray is just under $1000 on top of the almost $4k for Max itself. There are plenty of less expensive options out there.

I'd recommend checking out gile (which stands for global illumination editor). It's only around $70 and in conjunction with a decent modeler it looks like a very powerful tool for texture baking, espeically for builds. http://www.frecle.net/

Not a primary texture guy, but I have to do a fair bit being a 3D generalist, so I'll shoot my yap off anyway.

I use Max's render to texture with either a straight shadow pass from there, or a shadow capture material (I forget the official Max interface name) and use the complete pass from that. No real difference; one is solid and needs to be multiplied in Photoshop, the other has an alpha.

Either way I composite it with my base texture and other passes (AO and specular usually) in Photoshop layers with adjustments to make my materials. This is so I have control over each of the elements.

I use GI and photometric lights occasionally but for most textures I find that I have more control of shadows and the final look with boring raycasting lights and/or ambient occlusion. I can achieve similar results in fractions of the render time. Good for iterative stuff and deadlines (and debugging). I freely admit I'm the guy the acronym KISS was invented for though.

Typical stuff. Any of the "full service" packages like Maya, Max, XSI, Lightwave and such should have render to texture features that do shadow passes under their respective and trademarked names with associated marketing explaining how they are the best and you should give them lots of your money. Or there's Blender where you will have to come to terms with the interface, but you have to do that to one degree or other in any 3d app. Some more than others, and some much, much, much, more than others (it's not that bad really).

Edit: I use an offline builder and bake off of that for prims, sculpties are textured as they are built.

I've tried that, and have never once managed to get gile to do anything other than crash, even on an extremely simple scene

Perhaps that's because of user error/ignorance, but even so that should say something about the program. I'd rather stick with Blender, despite the hair-pulling interface, if that were the only other alternative I had.

I use Blender for making mulitple prim, or sculpties objects with static shadows..

er---Don't know how many times I have to stick up for Blender's interface (its not that bad folks!)

Tip1- use planes that are uv unwrapped to project shadows onto(walls, floors etc).. take into 2d app and cut around the shadow, then make it alpha.. now you can place it on a side of a cube or where ever to simluate the shadow.

Tip2- do all the baking once you have the scene set up in Blender with all parts in place, also think about your final intented result in SL when considering the direction of shadows etc.. is the chair back to a window for example? once you start using shadows you will have to stay consistent.. otherwise it ruins the effect immediately IMHO.

-why

Just sneakin a thanks here for all your answers, that was exactly what I needed.
If any of you guys ever need help, just shoot an IM!

Yes, it is. I didn't make that up or disparage Blender without reason. I've used it many times over the years, and I find the interface to be painful and arbitrary. Believe it or not, there's usually a reason for someone to say that they don't like something


Thanks for the tips I've been thinking about doing some builds with baked light and shadows lately...