Odd baking problem with Blender.

Hi, it's me again, back with another Blender problem.

I recently decided to touch up an older sculpt of mine as I've learned a lot since first making it so long ago, so I edited away for a while then baked it. That went perfectly fine, however the sculpt image was only 64x64 and these days I tend to upload my higher detail sculpts at 128x128. So I created a new image and baked again, only to have it turn out completely wrong.

I tried different settings and baked it once more, still wrong. Then I tried making another new image for baking ambient occlusion and got a similar result.

This is what the baked images keep turning up as every time I create a new image and bake:
http://img265.imageshack.us/img265/4541/brokenbakesgg2.jpg

However, baking to the existing 64x64 image goes just fine.

I've tried deleting all links to the materials and textures, saving, reloading and recreating them, flipping normals and even randomly clicking things hoping maybe it will help, all with no success. I seem to be stuck to a 64x64 image for this one mesh only.

In short, the existing image bakes fine, but anything new, even a new image of the same size results in something very wrong.

If anyone has a clue what might be causing this issue, please let me know.

Thanks.

Not sure about your blender issue, but if the 64x64 sculpt map is fine, you're set, as far as uploading to SL. If you want it to be 128x128, enlarge it in an image editor.

I'm guessing without seeing the UV map, but looks like you have only assigned some faces to the images you are baking. In UV Face Select press A once or twice so all faces are selected. Then in the UV Image Editor you can choose the image you want to bake to.

Blender works like that to let you bake to multiple images simultaneously. I suspect one of the other images will have the other half of these bakes

You might want to try adjusting the margin factor in your bake panel. increasing it can remove alot of the spots.

I found that for some shapes baking the original sculpt map at different sizes (try 256 - 512 - 1024) combined with margin settings (3-15 approx) can help.

If your pc can handle it bake at 2048 ...

resize to 64px before SL upload (very important!), use lossless if possible.

if you want a 'skin' baked texture for your prim the higher res you go intially in blender the better. Using very large images is good for blender's 3d texture painting , uv mapping and other painting techniques with external programs.

When you are satisfied with your texture resize and upload to SL at 512px for optimum results. For very large objects 1024px may be needed to show acceptable detail.

-w

Hm, all faces are selected and the margin is set at 2, same issue.

You may want to try posting a picture of your UV map here for us to look at.
Another critical thing to keep in mind is that you not only need to have all faces selected
but your uv mesh needs to cover your entire mesh leaving no holes or blank edges.

Also you can try making sure that you are not piling up images on your bake, for a new bake
click X out any prior images before creating a new fresh one to bake to.

Check to make sure that you have applied your multi-res before baking, most of the time it tells you but not always, probably depending on one of the various settings.

I have also been stumped (briefly) because I had one of my texture channels set to something other than 'blend' or something other than 'add'.

I hope this helps.

what size are you baking the image at?

try 512px and pushing the margin up to 10 or more.

If I understand, its for one shape only ... I have a few models that do not bake very well, usually if there are faces at sharp angles it may create these artifacts.

They will bake fine at one resolution, and not at any others. For the sculpt map, if you can manage to get a bake with 5 or 10 distortions its not that hard to use a smudge and blur tool in your favorite photo editor. If there are more than that its probably hard for the sculpt map.

For the skin texture though, Its fairly easy to touch up in PS or other.. Clone tool helps alot too. When editing the skin, make sure not to ruin any of the natural shadowing created from your bake lighting set up.


edit*** just thought of something, make sure you have set smooth on in edit buttons. When a new object is loaded into blender it will revert to solid by default.

Last guess, might some normals be flipped? CTRL-N in edit mode to recalculate.

Flipping the normals was one of the first things I tried :/, all faces are selected in both the 3D view as well as the image window. I have tried baking in resolutions from 64x64 up to 2048x2048 with margins as high as 20 and all channels are set to blend. The mesh has no visible flaws and I start with a clean image slate each time, only one image.

When I bake with VCol Paint, part of the sculpt map is visible but the rest is random triangles everywhere, as you can see. The multi-image thing does sort of make sense but I only ever have one image there. I do mostly get a smooth blend of colors when baking with TexFace/Texture mode, but all of the colors are wrong and three triangles still show up in the same spots each time.

Once again, the image will bake fine at the 64x64 image that is preset up when I open the .blend file. Textures, ambient occlusion and everything else bakes fine, I can edit the model, bake, and upload and it works perfectly, although too low res. However, the problem starts when I create a brand new image, even another 64x64 image and try to bake that. Then I get results like the photos in the first post, even when nothing has changed. I've had much more complex sculpts turn out great at any res, so I wouldn't think the shape would be the problem.

Here's a view of the UV layout:
http://img132.imageshack.us/img132/5567/uvpw3.jpg

I can send the actual .blend file as well if anyone feels like taking a shot at it, just send me an IM in-world if you're interested, (I am often on afk, but will get back to you soon!). I really do, appreciate the suggestions so far, I've never had such an odd issue before.

Export the model (File -> export) and choose the .obj format.

Then import into a new .blend file this should fix any corrupted object information.

-w

That worked great, thanks! It's fine now at any res .

One last quick question! Now when in UV Face select mode there is a wireframe overlay of sorts with gray lines even though I am not in wireframe or edit mode. How would I go about toggling these off?

Here's a picture.
http://img214.imageshack.us/img214/5286/graylinesdx6.jpg

Thanks again!