Texture baking standalone

#1 Yes. Gile[s] is an excellent program to bake textures.

#2 Thanx dirk gile[s] I have and it is a good program.. but it will only export based on its own UV map.. NOT the one supplied with the model.. and it doesnt look like this'll change anytime soon...
any other sugestions?

#3 Hmm. Maybe I got that wrong but - Gile[s] does import this UV coordinates plus UV map from Wings3D for example?
[EDIT]I forgot: same thing lightmapped.

#4 Interesting.. so your model.whatever and model_lmap.whatever have the same UV?

which format are you exporting to?

#5 Yes, they have. Why would that be so surprising? I am exporting to .obj.

#6 Ok it would appear that based on the complexitiy of the object this may/may not work..
With a simple cube using cubic UV mapping it works fine. With a 1.5k poly custom UV (character skin) it re writes the UV map with its own calcuated coords.. So while this will work good for lower poly objects, it wont work for character meshes.. So i guess im still looking...

#7 Well, the thing above is no simple cube :-).

What format do you have?

#8 I was interested in this too and from reading and posting on the Gile[s] forums found the same UV remapping problem that Kevin reports. The last time I tested I got a completely different set of UVs in the lightmap. A selling point of Gile[s] is the fast and efficient lightmap packing. Here's a bit of a thread on the Gile[s] forum from the developer Fredborg:

"As I understand the question is whether the lightmap can use the same uv coordinates as the main textures. This is useful for characters etc. which have already been unwrapped.
This will be added in the near future, texture baking is not, as it is extremely limited.
--Jul 27, 2004"
http://www.frecle.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=95&highlight=uv+map

So Fredborg doesn't believe texture baking is useful. And from looking at the recent and upcoming feature lists I don't see the 'Use original model uv coords for lightmap' feature.


Maybe Dirk's example is displaying with separate texture and lightmap files in Wings? With multiple UV sets.
@Dirk, what file format did you export to Gile[s]? And do you have a separate texture and lightmap files for this model?

#9 @Paul: yes you are right. And @Kevin, you were right too. I didn't fully understand what you were getting at (which wasn't clear from your first question). To rephrase it: your requirement is that the lightmap uses the very same UV coordinates as the skin texture.

Which is, as people state in the thread mentioned above, the same as if you had only one texture with lightmaps baked in. Three points here:
1) If we are talking about a character model I would 'paint' the shadows into the original skin and you have no need for lightmapping at all.
2)If you need lightmapping with a character then it would be dynamic lightmapping anyway, right?
3) It's easy to implement different UV coordinates once you already have multitexturing implemented (if you keep the lightmap separated from the texture, which might not be what you want).

Indeed, from the various packing methods in Gile[s] there is no 'pack on original texture'. Though I expect that not to be hard to implement, this seems a bit away from the Gile[s] mainstream, especially with the solutions provided above.

To clarify the pictures: yes, the model above has two texture layers with their own set of UV ccordinates. But it comes out correctly on the export, so I wouldn't talk about Gile[s] having UV mapping issues showing up wrong coordinates - Gile[s] works perfect here.

#10 ..so... once again is there anything out there that does standalone texture baking?? ;)

#11 I just googled texture baking and didn't have much luck in terms of indie-priced tools. Maybe we should petition Fredborg to add this to Gile[s] as I've seen other people interested. I think that baking global illumination info into a model texture would up the realism of our 3d models, not just our maps. We know that it's a feature of high-end tools, especially coupled with using a high poly model for the texture baking and normal map generation. I think it's a technology that just hasn't filtered down to the low cost tools yet.

Comments?


There are a bunch of plugins for the major 3d packages but here are a few standalone tools:


BakeAIR http://www.sitexgraphics.com/html/bakeair.html
$450


Turtle 1.1
http://www.illuminatelabs.com/products.asp
integrates with Maya but can run standalone
$1199


Mental Ray
http://www.mentalimages.com/2_6_purchase/index.html
included with a number of 3d packages but also available for standalone use
I didn't find the price listed, but for $495 you can pickup Softimage Foundation and it includes mental ray v.3.3

#12 Ok.. i've found some code for POVray to generate a baked texture from a proceedural and a UV.. I'll test then post my results

#13 I can attest Softimage XSI 4.2 has this feature and it seems implemented very well.

Truespace 6.6 has it also, but the implementation sucks because it produces 1 image polygon.

#14 G'day!
ive made a video tutorial on texture baking in blender, so you could use that if you cant find another way
http://www.sanctuslegacy.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1496

#15 YES! Thank you terence...This will work..

[edit]

which codec is it?? my player wont play it..

#16 Sorry! ill post a link to the codec
ill put them in the posts too

http://www.techsmith.com/products/studio/codecdownload.asp

feel free to post any questions you have on the thread i linked to before, i havent gotten any feedback for the vid yet, so dont know if its useful or not

edit: it does require you to be familiar with blender unfortunetly ;( might be worth a shot anyway

#17 3dsmax does it too of course. If your going to use 3dsmax though, I'd highly recommend Bakersfield. That really simplifys the workflow and helps you organise/manage the lightmaps in your scene.

www.chuggnut.com/scripts/bakersfield/bakersfield.htm

#18 Rendermap, from Softimage XSI package. Version 5 kicks ass at this stage. Used by Valve, on Halflife2 as well.

#19 Torque needs to have at least 1 extra UV channel for the DTS format. Then it will be comparable to most engines simce DX7. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that this will eventually happen. Even TSE only has 1 UV which holds back a lot of what can currently be done with pixel shaders too.

Our custom version of TGE supports lightmapping on a second UV channel, Doesn't use DTS though. Most applications that have a renderer will let you bake textures which you can apply to a single UV for giving a character some subtle shading. you may have to render it to a blank texture and merge the result in photoshop etc if it doesn't support the feature natively.

#20 What kind of restriction are you talking about in reguards to TSE and the 1UV DTS?