Maya, baking clothing, turtle, and Ambient Occlusion

Hello again,
i am still learning texture baking with maya and turtle as the renderer.
please excuse me if my questions are big or i sound strange, i have gone looking through
the different tutorials but am still having trouble trying to get the effect i really want out of it. i have been trying to bake the secondlife body model so i can get the right lighting and shade. i have not put a clothing texture on it yet (i am not sure how to) but i really wanted to get the lighting and shadows in first so i can perfect what i am doing before adding them.
i am using something in maya called " Ambient Occlusion". it works but it does not seem to have enough shadows or maybe i am just missing something. i tried using skylight with it and even tried some spot lights but they did not show and i cannot seem to get to the point where it has more shadowing around the sides, to bring in the look of the fabrics on the body. i know i am missing something but i am a bit lost and could really use any guidince givin.
could anyone recomend what i should add or take away, something i may be missing? i do not know the lingo and so cannot explain much further, but i hope someone might know and be able to help me. many thanks and have a good day

Just so you know, I wouldn't recommend doing this with the default models. The meshes are low-res, not very detailed, and they're not well shaped.

One of the main points of baking is to provide the illusion, via shading, of geometry that's not really there. There's not a whole lot of point in baking shadows from the default avatar shape, and then applying them to a customized shape in-world, unless you want your in-world avatar to look as dumpy as the default.

I'd highly recommend you modify the models (without changing the UV's), so they look sexier, or older, or younger, or thinner, or fatter, or wrinklier, whatever look it is you're trying to accomplish, before you even think about starting to bake. In order to that, you'll first need to get very good at the basics of polygonal modeling. There are no shortcuts here.


I know this probably isn't what you want to hear, but you're doing exactly what I always tell everyone NOT to do. You're putting the cart before the horse. If you don't yet know how to do something as simple applying a texture to a material, you've got no business trying to bake yet. Doubtless, there are lots and lots of other simple things you also don't know yet, any one of which would be a show-stopper for you right now. You have to learn this stuff in order, or you're destined for nothing but frustration.

So, either commit yourself fully to learning this stuff properly, or walk away now. Those are your choices. Do NOT keep trying to go out of order, or you'll just waste your time (and ours). Spend a few weeks learning it all the right way, or don't do it at all.

Had you gone through all the Getting Started tutorials in the help file, like you were supposed to when you began, you'd already know how to most, if not all, of the things you're asking about now. In the Rendering lessons, there's an entire section on shading surfaces, and in it is a page on how to assign textures. There's also a whole section on lighting, which I'm sure would answer most of the questions you've got on that subject. (But don't even think about exploring those lessons until you've been through all the ones that come before them.)


There are about a million ways you could end up with a look similar to what's in your "not what I was going for" image. I'd need to know a lot more about what you actually did to tell you what went wrong.

It looks to me, though, like what you created was an occlusion map, not a full texture, but just a component of one. The white areas represent where light reaches the surface freely and completely, without being blocked (occluded) by any surrounding geometry. The darker areas show where the surface geometery blocks some of the incoming rays. It's the same logic as an alpha channel. White represents maximum, black represents minimum, and shades of gray are in-between. By itself, it's just a data map. Only when combined with other elements does it become a full blown texture.

Or it could just be that you've got way too much light in the scene. Did you disable the default light in your render settings? If not, you could easily end up with everything washed out like that.

It could also be that you cranked up the incandescence setting on your shader material, causing the surface either to reflect too much light, or to emit its own light.

As I said, there are about a million possibilities. And since you don't yet know enough about this subject even to explain what you did or didn't do in the proper terminology, it's going to be very difficult to diagnose the problem. Again, the best advice I can give you is to put baking on the back burner for now, and spend the next few weeks learning Maya the right way. Only after you've mastered the basics should you attempt anything this advanced.


As for the second image, one obvious issue there, which I'm guessing was unintentional, is you're using a shiny material. It looks like a Blinn, or maybe a Phong. Unless you actually want it to be shiny like that, It should be a Lambert.

Also, your lighting is very uneven. Avatars look best when the lighting is coming from straight on, not from off to one side like that.

Texturing for real-time environments like SL is all about creating shading that looks plausible at any time of day. It must be believable under the widest possible range of in-world lighting conditions. You want your lighting to be as non-directional as possible. Any time you can tell what direction the light came from, the illusion will break down. Instead of looking plausible as shading, it looks like what it actually is, just a fancy paint job.




My recommendations:

1. Go through all the Getting Started tutorials in the Maya help file, in order. And I do mean all of them. Don't do a single other thing until you've done that.

2. (Optional) Invest in some good books on Maya. Read them attentively, and follow along carefully with all included tutorials. You'll find that the "Introducing Maya" series from Maya press is quite good.

3. Read the Turtle manual. It's a bit dry, but it does a wonderul job of explaining what everything is.

4. Go through the tutorials on the Tutle website. http://illuminatelabs.com/support/tutorial-folder

5. Ask for help if you need it.


If all of this sounds like more than you bargained for when you decided to get Maya and Turtle, all I can say is you should never spend $2000 on a platform, and $1400 on a renderer without first researching what it's going to take to learn to use them.

Maya and Turtle are both incredibly user-friendly, but that doesn't mean they're simple. It takes dedication and commitment to learn to do much of anything with either. It's not the kind of thing where you can just say "All I want to do is ______, so I'll just learn that part." Whatever "______" is, you can be there are lots of other things you'll need to know first in order to get to it. You must learn all the basics first, just like every other Maya user has, since the program was first invented. There's absolutely no way around that (nor should there be).

The good news it's not hard. A little time-consuming, maybe, but definitely not hard. Just don't be impatient about it, or you'll suffer needlessly. Make the commitment to learn it right, and you'll be where you want to go before you know it.