[Omniscaper]

Are there any chefs out there experienced in baking textures in 3dsmax?

I recently discovered the JOYS of "radiosity" and I'm trying to find a way to bake its effect as lightmaps into EXISTING textures assigned to EXISTING UV's. I'd rather not unwrap the object again just to have additional lightmaps. There must be a way to use existing UV's and bake new information into it.

With radiosity applied:


Without:


Its not enough for my to use glow maps in FSO on only the object glowing. I'd like to incorporate localized lighting created by the glowing object on its surroundings. I believe it will further enhance the look of ALL ships with glowing parts.

[Nuke]

ooooh pretty. i didnt know max could do that. it would be nice if i could render the lighting onto the texture, it would save on the time i spend in photoshop. i really should choke up the cashflow to purchase a copy of 3d studio max for dummies

[Taristin]

Texture baking won't do what you want it to do... if I'm reading that correctly.

The main hull texture is a tile, right?

Well, you'd have to have the model baked and use new UV mapping, and then try to apply the luminosity to it afterwards.

The problem I see is that lighting wouldn't apply to the map how you want it to. And when you bake a model, the lighting from the environment effects the outcome as well. If you baked the model with the lighting you have there, the rest of the model's map would be tremendously dark.

The only half way reasonable way I could see to do what you want to do, is to map the model completely black, or some matte color, bake it with the lighting effects you want, and then cut the rear of the model off of the ship, and overlay it over the original model. And use the baked light part to act as a glowmap. I.e. make a black 16x16 square with an alpha layer to render it invisible, and then use the baked map as the glow map for that 16x16 map. If you understand what I'm saying.

It would be of unnecessary work, though.

[Mad Bomber]

Originally posted by Omniscaper
Are there any chefs out there experienced in baking textures in 3dsmax?

You need to add a pinch of salt, a little yeast, and two tablespoons of baking powder into the floppy drive.

(runs)

[Omniscaper]

Originally posted by Raa
Texture baking won't do what you want it to do... if I'm reading that correctly.

The main hull texture is a tile, right?

 

The texture on this model is not tiled. It was previously baked by Scotchy. I'm trying to some how have 3dsmax bake the textures into the UV's previously established. Otherwise, it will be a painstaking process to seperate the mesh UV's into independent objects, bake each one, reintergrate it back together as a single mesh, and hope the UV's hold.

[magatsu1]

what the hell's texture baking ?

[Taristin]

Originally posted by Omniscaper


The texture on this model is not tiled. It was previously baked by Scotchy. I'm trying to some how have 3dsmax bake the textures into the UV's previously established. Otherwise, it will be a painstaking process to seperate the mesh UV's into independent objects, bake each one, reintergrate it back together as a single mesh, and hope the UV's hold.

Oh. Then yes. When you render to texture, turn off the 'unwrap' option.

That should force it to use the current UV mapping.

[Taristin]

Originally posted by magatsu1
what the hell's texture baking ?

A process in which a mesh is unwrapped according to it's texture smooth groups and angle, and the textures are combined onto a single larger map, rather than several smaller or tiling maps.

[Omniscaper]

Baking a texture (for video game purposes)  is a process used by many video games which goes back as far as Wingcommander 3. What they do is make a full CG quality render (shadows, bumpmap, light map, shadow,etc) and "bake" all those lighting effects that a typical game engine cannot produce into a simple texture (texturemap/lightmap). A game engine can now display a model with the appearance of CG quality lighting (non-interactive of course. Wing Commander 3 used Silicon Graphics computers to render their ships in high quality and used the quality in their in game textures.

Check it out, I did a preliminary test on METICULOUSLY baking new UV's and came up with these awesome but still glitch ridden results.





Sorry for the lack of shinemaps, I got an ATI 9500 pro (darn shine-bug). Is there anyway I can turn off all in game ambient light? I want to really see the effect in an absolute black ambient conditions.

I feel that these lighting subtlties makes lighting much more convincing.

Raa, even with the unwrap feature unchecked, it still pruduces its own for some reason.

[magatsu1]

not a fan of ST but that's still top notch.

[Taristin]

-ambient_factor .00

And I don't know why the mapping would change, but 3DMax does have it's idiosyncrasies...

[Omniscaper]

I tried that already but its still not all dark. Is there a way to remove the default sun thats there? I looked into the background setup in Fred and I find no sun set, yet its still there.

[StratComm]

You can do it with a modified stars.tbl I think, essentially setting the light level of a sun object to 0 and placing it in a mission.  It will still wash your view when you look at it, but it won't light up the environment.

I'm actually really impressed that baking the radiosity map actually worked.  My experience with glowmap rendering has been hit and miss when it comes to additive levels, so I'm glad you got it to do what you wanted.

As for making Max bake out all of the textures the way you want, you're sort of out of luck.  Max will always try to bake a single map out of whatever mesh you give the bake command to.  What you'll need to do is to select by material, detach each texture to its own object, and bake that.  When you're done you can use the attach command (don't bool!) and then weld verts on everything to return the model to its original geometry.

[Omniscaper]

I got it working correctly!!!!
 
I had to seperate the Material ID's as independent meshes first of course. From there, texture baking works with "auto-unwrap" turned off of course. I had to dig into the mesh to find and seperate all the material id sources. That sucked.

But now its the way I want it. I have the urge now to go into Freespace's newly light mapped models and apply the same effect.

[StratComm]

Were you using the "Select by Material ID" function?  It makes that pretty simple to get through.

[Omniscaper]

I was, its just that this model has over 20 material id's, many of which were mirrored textures. I had to do test bakes and compare it to its original texture arrangement in order to me sure that they matched precisely.

I find it funny that this looks better than the TV shows and movie versions. StarTrek:TNG's enterprise never had this effect to begin with because of multipass compositing. Even many of the CG versions of the Galaxy in VOY and DS9 didn't have lighting effects.

[StratComm]

20 textures?!?  What kind or rig are you running Omni?  With that many maps, HT&L should be visably stuttering.

[Omniscaper]

It actually uses 20 materials which utilizes 10 textures. I dont get it. I'm still trying to condense its material list. This is still MUCH more effecient than using the 30+ textures used when I was still using Truespace to achieve smoothgroups. Then I had to make each smoothgroup a serperate material, despite same textures.

[StratComm]

Well it's the 20 materials that had me concerned, glad you're working on it though.  Trouble is (and I don't know if the Max exporter fixed this or not), FSO renders each material seperately, or at least it did at one point, so if you had 5 materials named "hullplating" then that would be five seperate chunks of rendering data being sent to the GPU, despite only using one texture.  Truespace-native models are notorious for this.

[Bobboau]

you know that was one of the things I had always hoped people would take advantage of, thank you!