More Adventures In Texture Baking

After almost three years with the same bland textures in my building I decided it was finally time to do something about it, and it seemed like a good time to try something I've wanted to do for a long time - a build with fully baked textures (meaning with realistic ighting effects baked into the textures). It's still a work in progress but here's a couple of shots of how it's coming along. If anyone drops by to have a look I'd be very interested to get feedback on load times and framerates (It's the top pick on my profile if you want a landmark). Lemme know what ya think.

How in the world did you do that? Are you using Maya?

That's just amazing!

-- ddg

Thanks Danny I'm using 3ds Max to do the baking. I'll give you a quick outline of my process.

I spent a few hours with Max and SL open side by side copying and pasting prim parameters. I have Max set up to use meters as the unit system so basic prims without hollows or cuts translate directly. Once I had the build recreated I grouped all the objects that are planar to each other and not overlapping (north walls, south walls, etc.) I then created single object stand-in surfaces for each grouping and assigned them planar mapping coordinates (and also to the prims each standin object represented). I rendered wireframe views of each prim grouping out to it's planar mapping to be used as a guide for calculating tiling and offset values in SL). Finally I textured all the stand-in objects and lit the scene (there's around 40 lights being used). Each stand-in object was then rendered to a texture matching the planar mappings and guides I created earlier. Those textures were uploaded to SL, assigned to each prim, and aligned using Adrian Eisenberg's excellent free Texture Calculator utility.

Great work as always, sexy.

Thanks, Aimee <3 This is all your fault, you know. Ever since I saw your amazing StyleHive build I've been having an inferiority complex.

Heh...I actually followed most of what you said, Chip, so I'm feeling pretty good about myself.

Talentless, but good

-- ddg

Here's a few more shots. It's just about finished now. Hooray for OCD!

Chip, as always, your work is superlative, you are a forward thinker, and it shows

Looks good! And you have no idea how jealous I am that you can go from "work in progress" to "just about finished" in a day.

hehe, I'd guesstimate that it took me about 30-40 hours to do from start to "finish". Maybe more. It's still probably only a first draft. Now that the tedium is done I can refine the lighting and materials and rerender textures without having to do any aligning. I ran out of steam

chip,

looks good. you should look up glintercept. it will save you some time transfering sl build parameters out to another modeller.

Looks great, Chip. But what else would we expect from you? I think it's a law of the universe or something; if it's by Chip, it has to be awesome.

Thanks Chosen! Obviously you've never eaten my cooking

oh, i think your cooking is very tasty for the eye! i'll check it out as soon as i log on. mmm, baaaaked. *drools and claps and funky stuff like that*