Baking Assets - My blender version is not showing me what the tutorial tells me to expect.

[LordStark]

Hi,

I am trying to follow the Bake tutorial here:

However, when I got to step 2, I cannot see a UV Menu. Please see the attached picture.

The other issue was at step 1 where it says:

Quote

Each time you import an asset, it is important that you create a new material with the name of the .dae or the texture that is going to use if you know it. This will let us separate the object again after we join all the meshes together.

My concern is that I already know this model appears exactly how I want it to when ingame (except for an annoying circular "shadow" that appears on the roof - a remnant from the original model which I removed). I was unsure if this step is for people who are planning on retexturing their model or if I still need to do it. If I do need to do it, won't creating a new material cover the model with a different texture rather than what the original creator put on the model? Or would like create a new material and then open the texture file that comes along with this model and make no changes what so ever. 

All I am trying to do is get rid of the shadow ingame. Please see the second picture for an example of an unwanted shadow that I intend to remove after I have learned to remove the shadow from this object.

[Stan`]

This tutorial no longer applies after Blender 2.8 removed the internal renderer.

The reason you don't see the UVMap pane is because you have everything selected, including lights and cameras, and the active object is the light.

The game completely ignores blender materials. In fact, as a rule of thumb, I would recommend you delete every material prior to exporting meshes.

I don't have the time to write a complete tutorial right now, but you need to switch to cycle renderer. You might want to enable GPU instead of CPU if you have a nvidia gpu.

Create an empty texture not linked to anything in the shader editor

Untick noise threshold

4096 will generally generate no noise, but it might take some time to render. If you're adventurous you might try lower values. The more noise on the texture, the more crappy the texture will be both for the GPU, the filesize, and the performance.

Then you need to go to rendering tab and bake the ambient occlusion

You'll then need to go to the image window, where you can save the texture;

 

[LordStark]

Thank you so much for this. I think I am almost there. It is only the last step that has me stuck:

Quote

You'll then need to go to the image window, where you can save the texture;

Where is the imagine window?

[LordStark]

I think I worked it out. I forgot to press "bake". Was I clicked "bake" an imagine appeared in the number 3 window. I was able to save this. I saved it as "polish_civ_tex_spec" which is the same name as one of the original files that most closely resembled what I was editing - but there is not change in game...

[Stan`]

Oh right missed a step. You need two UVs, one for diffuse, normal and spec which you obviously used here, and one for AO.

13 minutes ago, LordStark said:

n imagine appeared in the number 3 window. I was able to save this.

That's the image window I was talking about.  Also known as image editor, and uv editor (Shift + F10) (You can switch from one another by pressing Shift F10 another time)

So you need to add another UV map.

Then you need to select it and mark it as active

Then bake again.

Important: You need to regenerate that AOMap  uvmap, every single time you add or remove faces from the building. Using the smart uv project tool works file, but sometimes you need some manual edit. e.g

Versus

The second one is better because it maximises the texture space usage.

Margins are important because of mipmaps.

 

 

[hyperion]

•  I don't see spec in bake type options
• Why not use the same UV for all maps?

[Stan`]

7 minutes ago, hyperion said:

I don't see spec in bake type options

That's because newer pipelines use PBR. So they have roughness and metallic or roughness and glossiness and no longer specular. Changing this would require redoing all the textures. But it might happen someday.

Diffuse would become an albedo, and we'd need to get rid of all the light information

 

10 minutes ago, hyperion said:

• Why not use the same UV for all maps?

Optimization. Instead of having one diffuse, spec and normal texture per model, you have one per civ. And not all of them have AO.

 

 

[hyperion]

45 minutes ago, Stan` said:

That's because newer pipelines use PBR. So they have roughness and metallic or roughness and glossiness and no longer specular. Changing this would require redoing all the textures. But it might happen someday.

So there is no option to bake a spec map for 0ad any longer with recent blender? Why is there still diffuse then?

 

47 minutes ago, Stan` said:

Optimization. Instead of having one diffuse, spec and normal texture per model, you have one per civ. And not all of them have AO.

Makes sense, thanks.

[Stan`]

6 minutes ago, hyperion said:

So there is no option to bake a spec map for 0ad any longer with recent blender? Why is there still diffuse then?

Don't think it has ever had one. Inverted roughness should work IIRC. 

Probably leftover or confusion between diffuse and albedo.

 

[hyperion]

Ok, so I followed a tutorial to create a procedural gold cube. Baking the diffuse gives me a black texture as one would expect, stetting metallic to 0 and baking diffuse gives something that looks to be albedo.

Roughness should be grayscale, the inverse would still be grayscale while spec for gold should be closer to albedo for gold, right?

Guess having an additional shader/material for use with blender baking for modders would be nice even if existing textures used the old one.

[hyperion]

@Stan`,

loosely followed https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Basic3DImplementation

Packed it all into a mod but the result doesn't seem to be available in the atlas, must (read-only / owned by root) public mod be edited for that?

[Stan`]

51 minutes ago, hyperion said:

 

Roughness should be grayscale, the inverse would still be grayscale while spec for gold should be closer to albedo for gold, right?

Well yeah and that would work, but @vladislavbelov said it should only be grayscale in the game, and instead the shader should get the diffuse color to do the computation.

52 minutes ago, hyperion said:

 

Guess having an additional shader/material for use with blender baking for modders would be nice even if existing textures used the old one.

Indeed. @Alexandermb used baking extensively.

For baking reflective material it's usually nice to use an HDRI. setting color to environement texture.

47 minutes ago, hyperion said:

@Stan`,

loosely followed https://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Basic3DImplementation

Packed it all into a mod but the result doesn't seem to be available in the atlas, must (read-only / owned by root) public mod be edited for that?

Mmmh it should be under actors(all); to be under entities you should add a template. If it's not maybe you didn't load your mod.

[LordStark]

Mine have different names. Which one should I call UVMap and which would should I call AOMap?

Also, once I have baked it, am I correct that I should be saving a single texture file as "polish_civ_tex_spec"? Or do I bake the texture once and save it as "polish_civ_tex_spec" and then do the extra bit of creating an AO thing and bake it again and call the new one "polish_civ_tex_nrm"?

Edited July 6, 2022 by LordStark

[Stan`]

43 minutes ago, LordStark said:

Mine have different names. Which one should I call UVMap and which would should I call AOMap?

When importing, usually the one named 0 is UVMap, and the one named 1 is AOMap. It gets replaced by the mesh name (not the object name) when exporting.

43 minutes ago, LordStark said:

Also, once I have baked it, am I correct that I should be saving a single texture file as "polish_civ_tex_spec"?

That is incorrect. You are baking AO, aka ambient occlusion. So it should be named polish_civic_center_ao.png or put in a folder called ao and called polish_civic_center.png.

See ArtFileNamingConventions – Wildfire Games for guidelines you might want to follow.

 

 

 

 

Name	Abbreviation	Meaning
Specular	_spec	Reflectivity of the material
Normal	_norm	Height information of the material NormalMaps – Wildfire Games
Diffuse	N/A	Color information of the material
Ambient Occlusion	_ao or put in an ao folder.	Rendering method that provides an approximation of how bright light should be at different parts of a visible surface.