Texture baking - I'm not getting it

Texture baking - I'm not getting it

I need a workflow to create baked texture maps. I am hoping it will help stabilize the model in Unity. The first attachment is one of the meshes from the model as it should look. The second is the rendered bake map. How do I apply this to the mesh? The third is the settings I used for the bake. These are also the same settings I was using for the lightmaps, with the exception of color being disabled.Help!

As you have already a proper UVset1 don´t hit "create" at "Baking UV coords" as it will generate a different one automatically again. Just add baking tag, switch to UV1 and hit the "bake render" icon.

Cheers
Frank

How do I apply the result back onto the mesh? Will creating a new mat with the texture set to all work?

Duplicate the mesh (or kill the materials that are already asigned) and generate new material and load the baked texture into the diffuse channel. Assign it to the mesh in the object browser. That should do it.

Cheers
Frank

frank beckmann said:

As you have already a proper UVset1 don´t hit "create" at "Baking UV coords" as it will generate a different one automatically again. Just add baking tag, switch to UV1 and hit the "bake render" icon.

Cheers
Frank

Click to expand...

When do you and when should you not hit the Bake UV coords? Could you explain a bit more? Thank you.

uncle808us said:

When do you and when should you not hit the Bake UV coords? Could you explain a bit more? Thank you.

Click to expand...

When you made an UV-layout of objects choose "Bake to: UV1" and skip "Baking UV coords" at the Bake Texture tool. If you don´t have any UV-layout and not going to make one still choose "Bake to: UV1" and hit "Bake Texture" icon. Cheetah3d supports 2 UVsets but these are normally used in conjunction in a game engine.

Cheers
Frank

The simple workflow is:

1) Create and texture your model.
1a) Back up!

From here, the simple version:
2) Combine everything into one mesh ( :-( )
3) Add Baking tag to the mesh.
4) Bake coords to UV2 (assuming you're using UV1 for your actual texture mapping; if it's all procedural or simple assignment, you can use UV1).
5) Render the baked image and save it.
6) Create a new material with an image node feeding its color into the shader's diffuse input (this is not quite right, but works best owing to C3D's editor view rendering).
7) Load the image into the image node.
8 ) Apply the material to the mesh.
9) Set your mesh to UV Set 2.

You should now see your mesh with everything baked into it, and it usually looks pretty awesome.

If you're actually trying to produce a pre-lit mesh for a game, for example, you need to jump through some more hoops.

You may want everything in UV1. What you can do is either copy the UVs from UV2 to UV1 at this point or (if nothing has changed) simply bake to UV1 after rendering (you did back up, right?).