[fightermedic]

For those of you using Blender for modelling, and who might not have noticed it yet: there is a new Blender release that finally allows for baking textures with the more advanced Cycles render now
I for one certainly ain't going back to the old renderer from my next ship onwards
you can get the Cycles-Baking release here:
http://graphicall.org/?keywords=baking+cycles

if you by chance have no idea how cycles works, search for Andrew Prices' excellent blender tutorials on youtube

[The Dagger]

It looks very promising and I've been keeping an eye on this.
I rather wait on an official build before switching but I'd like to know if you can define a material emmisivity and emission color with a texture. That would make baking glowmaps so much easier than manually putting lights in place.

[fightermedic]

i've always done that with the old renderer, if you do not use raytracing for baking the full render it is already possible, in fact i'm doing it right now
the problem is that the aproximate render method sucks

this is the main reason why i'm so excited about Cycles, it is BUILT to render emissive lights from surfaces, that's the default way to light something here

[The Dagger]

Great!   
For baking glows I use lights and raytracing 'cause it's the only way to get shadows, but it's a pain in the arse to set the lights. 

[fightermedic]

yea, that's why i did it only once, and used the lower quality aproximate afterwards, even though the shades are very inaccurate here

[rhettro]

Blender is growing by leaps and bounds. I recently grabbed the latest 3D texture painting build that supports straight lines. I'm looking forward to roughing out the textures directly on the model and then cleaning them up or using them as a guild for the master textures in Photoshop.