BumpMaps, Photoshop and LW

[leigh]

Originally posted by MooseDog
aar, what struck me was the guy's use of maya to export texture maps as a single image to be used in PS. leigh, try as i might, i just could not find a similar capability in LW.

It's called the Surface Baker shader ;)

Unfortunately it is usually only for baking colour/lighting and one or two other things out, BUT all you need to do to get bump maps out is set up all your procedural bump maps, dump them all into your colour channel, and then bake them :D

Be aware though that you need to have set up a UV map for the model whose surface you are baking. Very cool way to get a nice cellular texture happening - I use it all the time!

Photoshop Noise Generator: Cloud.2.2 (http://www.geocities.com/murakuma/mmplugins.html)

also came across this as a stand-alone noise generator:

Swedish Caustics Generator (http://www.lysator.liu.se/~kand/caustics/)

easy enough to cut n' paste the image.

hope this is helpful to somebody

Cool, I'm going to check those out :D

[MooseDog]

light goes on, angels sing, MD waits several years for surface baker to render;)

thanks so much:thumbsup:

[manfriday]

Leigh,

This is probably seem like a dumb question. becuase it is a dumb question. :)

But when you set up all your layers in the bump channel, copy them and throw them into the color channel..

do you find you need to screw with the color of the procedurals in each layer or do you just leave them?

Do you set the basic color of the object to 128 128 128? or white?

I have tried playing around with baking procedurals for bump maps and when it gets tossed into the color channel the look of the map it produces always surprises me.
Just not quite what I was expecting.

Can ya gimmie the proverbial "low-down"?
:)

[leigh]

Yeah, I do usually find that I have to tweak the settings a bit when they are applied in the colour channel :)
Sometimes I have to make them white, sometimes a medium gray - it really depends.

Alternatively what you can do is simply make them all white, and then render each layer individually through Surface Baker. That way you could layer them and blend them in Photoshop instead - probably a wiser move since this gives you far more control :)

[manfriday]

thanks Leigh!
:)

you rule

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