Settings for Baking Sculpties in Blender/Primstar

Are these the right settings for baking my sculpt maps in Blender with Primstar? They're the defaults that come up but I keep just getting a black square instead of a colored map and a "bake failed" message in the status window.

ETA: Just as an experiment I started with a new file and an unedited sphere and got a colored sculpt map. I edited it a little and rebaked and saw obvious changes. Could there be some setting I messed up in the other file I'm working with that prevents me baking the map?

You may find part of your answer in the primstar documentation on the machinimatrix website:

http://blog.machinimatrix.org/2009/10/30/primstar-bake-mesh/

Concenring the black image and "bake failed" there can be many reasons why this happens. Most probable reason seems that you have done something to the object that was not intended to be done and the baker failed to bake that...

In order to give a better answer it would be necessary (for me) to take a look at the .blend file ... Or look at the domino designs website. Maybe your question has already been answered there...

http://www.dominodesigns.info/

Try tabbing into edit mode and select the object you wish to bake before baking it. You'll see the object selected in the 3D view, and then bake (blender needs to know specifically what object you wish to bake as you can have several in the scene at a given time.

Blender's image handling is done in two stages. The first is the image information stored in the .blend file. This is the image name, it's filename, size and Blender settings. The actual image data isn't stored in the blend file unless you pack it.

So if you have saved the image, then deleted the image file from disk or moved it or the blend file (so the path in the blend is incorrect), Blender can't find the image data. This gives the black image and errors during baking that you describe.

The easiest way to fix it is to go into edit mode, select all vertices (on multires level 1 if using it), go over the UV Image editor and select all there too. Now create a new image with the same size as the original (press n over the image to see it's size).

Baking the sculpt map should then work.

Thanks, but still no joy. That's OK, though since this is kind of a throwaway learning file that is giving me trouble. As long as I can try baking the sculpt multiple times, I'll just do that when I get to working on a real project to check now and then that I haven't crossed some line of unbakeability.