Fusalage Texture Baking

[Lazy J]

Hey everybody,

I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to make a baked texture for the fusalage of my plane. If someone could give me some help or point me to a good tutorial I would greatly appreciate it.

 

[Devinci]

Hey everybody,

I have been trying (unsuccessfully) to make a baked texture for the fusalage of my plane. If someone could give me some help or point me to a good tutorial I would greatly appreciate it.

I haven't tried texture baking yet but it should be the same as for buildings... You need to have a light in the scene and use the texture baking to create some texture files that you'll merge with the default diffuse texture of the fuselage... At least, that's what I think!

 

[Lazy J]

Well I tried putting an omni light in the scene and baked the texture but it ended up with shadows in random places...

So I guess I need to know where exactly to put the lights and what kind of lights to use for the best result.

P.S. I am using Max to do the texture baking

 

[hairyspin]

From what little I know of this, you need some geometry around your object to get shadowing and reflections etc working right. Something like a very big sphere or box with the polys facing inwards to bounce light around while Max is raytracing the renders. Have fun!

 

[Jordi]

I assume you're using MAX, so let me explain my personal way of doing things.

First off, put a skylight into your scene. I would only ever recommend skylight for baking moving objects such as aircraft. Hard shadows never look good baked onto an aircraft. Keep in mind the skylight can be placed anywhere and any direction.

Press F10 and navigate to the advanced lighting tab. Set it up as shown below.

Once you've done that, make a poly/plane just below your aircraft that is just a bit a bigger than your aircraft.

Your scene should now look like this.

You can now go ahead and bake it as you would normally.

Keep in mind I used the Scanline Renderer for this. I don't always use Mental Ray, but when I do, it's for ambient occlusion.

 

[Lazy J]

Thanks.

That cleared up a lot for me.

 

[Mathias]

From what little I know of this, you need some geometry around your object to get shadowing and reflections etc working right. Something like a very big sphere or box with the polys facing inwards to bounce light around while Max is raytracing the renders. Have fun!

That's a good thing to do with the mr renderer (no experience here whatsoever with the default scanline renderer).
For one to give the light and reflections something to play with but also to reduce stray light rays that would otherwise shoot into infinity what in return dramatically increases render time.
Ideally you would texture the sphere with a HDRI environment map.
The let's call it so - environment sphere needs to be hidden though when baking ambient occlusion.
Personally I like to render to different elements:
- Diffuse without shadows and without lighting effects
- Spec map
- Lighting map
- finally AO without the sphere
Later compose the stuff in the paint programm using various blending technics for use as RGB or spec map.
Using render elements has the benefit that the outcome remains highly editable and you also get good material to create spec and reflection maps if needed.