December 19, 2007
at 9:00 am /
#21950
You can’t texture bake with Gile as yet. although Fredborg has realeased a Texture Baker app.
I haven’t used it but I think it works something like this….
You load the model into Gile, create the lightmap(s) and save the file as a .b3d file
Next you drag this file onto the Texture Baker app and it will bake the textures for you using the lightmap.
You can then save out the baked textures to your hard drive.
I’m really not convinced texture baking has much of a future except in certain circumstances.
As Richard says you can’t just use the same texture over and over on different parts of the model, to make it work you either need to unwrap the WHOLE model or create a series of identical textures for different areas of the model.
This is very uneconomical, not only that but the baking usually degrades the original texure to some extent.
If you need this sort of thing a lightmap is a much better option, you can apply textures as normal, the lightmap then creates the shadows/highlights as a seperate texture.
The advantage is that you can convert the lightmap to a 16 bit image or convert to a .dds file saving on memory.
ie. you could lightmap a model you already have without changing any of the textures, however if you wanted to bake the textures for the same model you would need to more or less re-texture everything.
There is a downside to both lightmaps and textue baking….
You can’t lightmap or texture bake an animated model, ie the wheels and valve gear on a locomotive.
If you did, as the wheels turned, so would the shading, making things look very odd indeed.
You could lightmap or texture bake the superstructure as this isn’t animated.
It’s just my opinion, but I wouldn’t spend to much time on the texture baking idea Richard, lightmapping would be a much better feature to have. I know most of the high end modelers have texture baking available but as you say it’s mainly used to create stuff for low spec machines nowadays.
Very few modelers have a lightmapping feature, maybe you could be one of the few.
Maybe an option to bake the textures if required.
Having said all that, I still think you can improve the appearence of your models much better just by adding shadows, shading and highlights to the textures as you create them. It takes a lot longer but it’s worth the effort, and you get much better results than either texture baking or lighmaps can produce.
Bazza
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