CGTalk - baking textures and exporting textures from faces

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jcterzin

04-28-2009, 08:46 PM

So Ive been texturing this dungeon for a couple of weeks now using high res textures in maya. the dungeon itself is one object with cut and extruded faces to make the walls. here is the issue, I want to bake the shadows onto the materials ive created for the walls and floors but I cant do that because i have alot of overlapping UV's. the shadows appear wherever i used that material and so they show up in places that I don't want them to. Here is the question. Can I somehow export a material off a single face and save it as an independent texture?

SmallPoly

04-28-2009, 10:57 PM

I'm not sure how to do it Maya (max user), but you should be able to create a separate set of UVs for the light baking that doesn't have any overlaps.

jcterzin

04-29-2009, 03:09 PM

hmm, i suppose im just having a ton of issuesw with it. i tried it again and it sort of worked but the textures came back washed out and blurry.

gsokol

04-29-2009, 05:31 PM

Washed out and Blurry? Maybe your shadow map is just too small? Did you create seperate UV's for the shadows?

SmallPoly

04-29-2009, 06:36 PM

Hey jcterzin,

Forgot to ask - is this intended for realtime viewing or rendered?

Depending on the size of the lightmap you're storing, that's to be expected, especially if the scene is pretty large. Fortunately, the lightmap doesn't need to match the resolution of the diffuse to look good on the model. You will never be able to match the sharpness of raytraced shadows with a lightmap, not that you'd necessarily want to.

Having the textures washed out sounds like exposure problem. If you don't have any brights or darks clipped, make a tiff or psd version of your lightmap, bring it into photoshop and add a levels adjustment layer. If you have any other lightmaps, copy the same adjustment layer to those to keep everything consistent. It will be faster than messing around with Maya's exposure settings and waiting for new renders to finish, and since you're using an adjustment layer, it will be non-destructive.

jcterzin

04-30-2009, 01:15 AM

ill try that and see where it goes. im actually trying to bake the textures on the surface so that I can take the environment into virtools so I can make it interactive for a class. I dont know what you mean, gsokol, about making seperate UV's for just the shadows.

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04-30-2009, 01:15 AM

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