Baking AO and stuff (help)

roosterMAP

when I bake AO maps using Max, I always get a little bit of the background color (usually black) to leak into the model. Im told that you can avoid this by baking using xNormals. Is there a tut out there i can use?

lildragn

Xnormal is pretty simple to use actually...

- Just load in your in-game mesh (Low def)
- Load in your hires (high def)
- choose your map options (baking options)
- Then click generate maps

There might be a youtube vid out there. But it's pretty simple and produces nice results especially if you fiddle with the frontal and rear ray distance numbers in the low definition section.

Eric Chadwick

This might help?
Ambient Occlusion Baking - by Laurens Corijn

from the wiki page
Ambient Occlusion Map

Ott

Or you could just change the background color in max to white, and when you multiply it in Photoshop, all of the white will disappear....

yiannisk

i like simple solutions

r_fletch_r

or you could just set the padding amount to a higher value you can see it in the above image. Worth noting because its usually not possible with a diffuse or normal map to find 1 colour which will clean up the edges of all islands

Eric Chadwick

I added some notes about padding here, fwiw.
http://wiki.polycount.net/Edge_Padding#line-18

EarthQuake

eric: note for padding: "You can never have too much, ever, never ever ever have too much, its a non-existent problem having too much padding".
I use like 32 pixels for everything, because well, why not?

Eric Chadwick

Agreed, I fill my own gutters with all padding.

But I don't think you put 64 pixels of space between each shell. Sure the shell colors are often similar enough that it doesn't really matter, but when it does it really does.

I could make it clearer though. I think it's not so clear that the shell spacing is as important as the padding itself.

Padding is frikken boring.

Eric Chadwick

There you go.

The padding stops, but the texture filtering does not. When the game scales your texture down (mips usually) that gutter is going to get smaller and smaller, so neighboring shells will bleed into one another.

So you get seams either when the model is far away (textures are small) or a seam is seen nearly edge-on (textures are filtered again very small).

Decent gutter width, and decent padding, both help reduce this. Especially when you have really different colors in the UV shells.

Eric Chadwick

Added a 3rd image to try to explain it...

http://wiki.polycount.net/Edge_Padding

roosterMAP

wow, thx guys. im really happy you all came to my rescue. I never new what the panning option was really for.

thx again. i think i have everything i need.

Eric Chadwick

DKK wrote: »

I thought you guys were talking about rendering out maps with padding, thats what I meant by it stops when it collides.

You're right, most tools' padding does stop when it hits itself (Photoshop's Maximum filter doesn't). But if the gutter isn't wide enough, you'll get seams, no matter how much padding you use.

EarthQuake

The fact that it will stop when it hits something is the reason you can never have too much padding, because it will just stop before it does any harm, i would rather have a texture who's unused uvspace is 100% padding than "underpad" and worry about it.

r_fletch_r

Thats one thing i love about 3d coat. it fills empty areas with padding automatically