Since the devs. implemented the new tangent basis, i though i would do a little test to see what everything looked like. It seems they managed to match to the GLSL shader, Baker and the Rendering engine 100%
To illustrate how you can use one smoothing group (if the the Tangent basis of the Baker matches the engine), see below
There's going to be a free version of this with restrictions, but I'd really like to see see Blender have this functionality... it's really missing a good, integrated crowd simulator.
Yeah nice bakes, I was fiddling with normal maps earlier and it's no joke getting them to come out so clean without a cage. Coupled with the fact that the obj exporter in 2.58 still seems to mess up the vertex order, at least according to XNormal.
I've been messing around with 2.5+ for a while and actually really liking it. I keep, sometimes getting an error when I bake where it says 'No objects or images found to bake to' and I can't work out what I'm doing to break or fix it. Any ideas?
Yeah nice bakes, I was fiddling with normal maps earlier and it's no joke getting them to come out so clean without a cage. Coupled with the fact that the obj exporter in 2.58 still seems to mess up the vertex order, at least according to XNormal.
Do you get an error message, or is this something you have noticed?
I've been messing around with 2.5+ for a while and actually really liking it. I keep, sometimes getting an error when I bake where it says 'No objects or images found to bake to' and I can't work out what I'm doing to break or fix it. Any ideas?
That means that you dont have an image assigned to the object you are trying to bake to.
Make sure you assign a new image to your LP while it is in edit mode. Then select the HP and shift select the LP and hit bake.
Yeah nice bakes, I was fiddling with normal maps earlier and it's no joke getting them to come out so clean without a cage. Coupled with the fact that the obj exporter in 2.58 still seems to mess up the vertex order, at least according to XNormal.
Honestly, I just export the cage from Maya and use that and the .obj from Blender, until we get something better.
That means that you dont have an image assigned to the object you are trying to bake to.
Make sure you assign a new image to your LP while it is in edit mode. Then select the HP and shift select the LP and hit bake.
Thanks maybe I wasn't in edit mode when I did it or I was doing something to the object that took it out occasionally.
When you are using a set ray distance, its will use those values even if they are not suitable for some parts of your mesh (bad for fingers vs perfect for a head etc.)
Using a cage allows you to set, and control, the perfect ray distance and direction for all parts of your mesh, so you get much cleaner bakes
Using uniform ray distances can cause the rays to miss parts of the HP mesh when baking which, in turn, causes things like seams and other errors in the normal map.
ah yeah I get the cage principle but some cases it's probably ok just to separate them. Although like you said handy for fingers.
Another question.. I don't know if this is going to make sense but I'm getting the lo poly model showing up in the bake. I'm trying to bake cross sections though an object and get all the information there, so the end result would be like an MRI scan. When I make the object transparent in the material or hide it from the outliner I get the no image error from before
edit: so the question is, whats the best way to get the low poly mesh out of the bake?
I want to get the texture of the sphere without the plane in it to get a proper alpha. I made the plane purple so you can obvously see it appearing in the bake at the bottom....
In this case, i would make the Sphere a separate object and move the plane above it. I would then select the sphere, shift click the Plane and bake.
Is that what you mean?
*edit*
It seems like Blender wont make an alpha for this if you bake like that
As a work around, give the Sphere a diffuse colour of Black and bake "textures". You can then invert it or whatever you need
Hmm no not really, the purple plane is what I want to bake from and the sphere is already a separate object, so I need the plane not to show up in the render and then I'll get the sphere shape in the alpha... Not sure if I'm being clear?
It seems like Blender wont make an alpha for this if you bake like that
As a work around, give the Sphere a diffuse colour of Black and bake "textures". You can then invert it or whatever you need
They still haven't fixed the freaking horizontal panel bug where if your panel is pre-2.5 style (like when you get when you open an old file), then go to the modifiers tab then add a modifier then the fonts and scaling all go to hell.
They still haven't fixed the freaking horizontal panel bug where if your panel is pre-2.5 style (like when you get when you open an old file), then go to the modifiers tab then add a modifier then the fonts and scaling all go to hell.
I didnt realise there was bug with that
You prob. know this, but if you open a .blend through the file menu, you can uncheck "Load UI" which will keep your default 2.5x theme.
I haven't actually got the normal baking to work, nothing happens when I select normal's from the option, but I'm not actually using normals at the moment so haven't looked into further.
Anway, the diagram shows that the rays terminate on the first poly it hits going outwards (green x) rather than the last one(red x). Meaning that you get the backside of any floating or overlapping details you attach.... Sounds a bit of a downer on the baking tools.
Again the pluple/red poly is casting and the baked image is at the bottom.
edit: I got normal map baking working and it does the same thing.
From what I remember it would be better if the tool actually traced back towards into the model from the max distance and then terminated on the first point it hit.
I don't like the title of this thread... Blender is kicking ass, the thread title makes it sound like its trying to be as good as Max and Maya etc. but in a few ways it surpasses them. Should be renamed just 'Blender'.
I don't like the title of this thread... Blender is kicking ass, the thread title makes it sound like its trying to be as good as Max and Maya etc. but in a few ways it surpasses them. Should be renamed just 'Blender'.
I think a thread renaming is in order now too...It's more of a generic Blender thread now
i'd vote "Blender sucks, hopeless, can not compete" just for the sensationalism upon the infamous global impatience for the hotkey-driven learning curve.
LeiLei, you're one bitter ghost mate, should I recommend some Beetle-Juice?
Get it? Beetle Juice? Because your avatar is a Ghost? Beetle Juice was a movie with such ethereal based stuff? So you drink it? Get it? Anyone? No? Yes? No? No?
i'd vote "Blender sucks, hopeless, can not compete" just for the sensationalism upon the infamous global impatience for the hotkey-driven learning curve.
Is that some reverse psychology I detect; to get the Blender haters to come to this thread so they can find out how awesome it is?
Beatlegeuse is the ghost with the most! Beatlegeuse! Beatlegeuse! Beatlegeuse!
i can attest to the utter awesomeness of rigify it is absolutely perfect and easy and awesome and one of the best scripts released in recent memory.
for 99 percent of rigging purposes rigify will do the trick.
i mean it works with the default humanoid rig that comes installed with blender and once you learn about its tagging system you can do just about any kindof rig you want, you can also add new types of rigs to it so that 1 percent of rigs you cant do you can easily add into it if i recall.
@Frankie,
You need to move the LP plane above any objects you wish to bake onto it
Is this what you want to achieve?
No not really, the point applies to all baking so when you are baking a proper low poly mesh you will miss the details like the ball as you cannot move it mesh in that case.
The box, ball and plane are the simplest test but in a real example there could be something like a rivet or bolt on top of a small box on top of the high poly base that would get missed.
No not really, the point applies to all baking so when you are baking a proper low poly mesh you will miss the details like the ball as you cannot move it mesh in that case.
The box, ball and plane are the simplest test but in a real example there could be something like a rivet or bolt on top of a small box on top of the high poly base that would get missed.
It's perfectly possible to bake floaters that are outside the LP
Depending on the asset, there are different ways you should set up your bake.
When you are baking objects like floaters onto a plane, the easiest way is to move the object you are baking onto, to be above the objects you want to bake. This works 99% of the time with just a default bake.
Any objects that are directly below the first mesh that the rays hit are occluded and not shown on the normal map
For things that are more complicated, like a regular LP asset, you just need to tweak the Distance and bias by small amount.
In the example below, the slot is outside the LP mesh but the rays are projected to the correct length because the Bias and Distance are set correctly. The value i used for it are Distance =0.200 Bias =0.100
thanks for the examples but I'm not really asking for help on this one, unless I'm really mistaken there no way it will bake properly with complicated low to high poly objects. But yeah, I could kind of do a work around with my plane example.
Although maybe I'm missunderstanding what bias does.... It helps a little in tests.
thanks for the examples but I'm not really asking for help on this one, unless I'm really mistaken there no way it will bake properly with complicated low to high poly objects. But yeah, I could kind of do a work around with my plane example.
Although maybe I'm missunderstanding what bias does.... It helps a little in tests.
While baking with cages would be ideal (and i still use xnormal, because of this and its speed), you can still get some pretty decent results without them.
I did a bake test with (Distance 0.00, Bias 0.010). There are a few errors, but it certainly does very well.
Nice model and bake, although I'm not sure if it has the situation I was trying to describe appearing in that example. Like Dim said maybe I shouldn't keep posting in this thread so I'll post or message you when I need to bake a model that isn't just from a plane.
In the mean time, maybe this info of a possible shortfall will help anyone who's missing multiple layers of info from bakes.
The strange thing in all this is the bias and I can't quite work out what it's doing.
edit: I mean't to ask did you sculpt it in blender?
Nice model and bake, although I'm not sure if it has the situation I was trying to describe appearing in that example. Like Dim said maybe I shouldn't keep posting in this thread so I'll post or message you when I need to bake a model that isn't just from a plane.
In the mean time, maybe this info of a possible shortfall will help anyone who's missing multiple layers of info from bakes.
The strange thing in all this is the bias and I can't quite work out what it's doing.
edit: I mean't to ask did you sculpt it in blender?
I didnt sculpt or create the model. It's from this tutorial from Eat3d.
I like this has become a super thread for Blender tbh, and i prefer to have everything in on place, rather than having loads of smaller threads. Currently i see this thread as a kind of sound board for Blender related goodies.
I dont think its so way off topic though, as apart from the odd small derailing, it still about new projects, features and how Blender is upping its game and competing with the big apps.
About the baker...Distance controls the maximum distance that the LP and HP meshes are away from each other and Bias sets a bias toward objects that are further away.
Haha yeah it's a cool thread. If you were going to post one more thing to help it would be a diagram of what bias does... (the text dosen't mean anythign to me) because I'm thinking it just chooses the start of the ray but when I test it's doing something else .
About the vertex order changing- it's an error message I get in XNormal. I even get a different vertex order change on shape keys of the low-poly mesh with the verts slightly pushed out. The only time the order matches up exactly is when the cage's vert positions are completely identical, which really is of no use to me...
So you mentioned you do your bakes in Xnormal, any hints as to what I might be doing wrong?
About the vertex order changing- it's an error message I get in XNormal. I even get a different vertex order change on shape keys of the low-poly mesh with the verts slightly pushed out. The only time the order matches up exactly is when the cage's vert positions are completely identical, which really is of no use to me...
So you mentioned you do your bakes in Xnormal, any hints as to what I might be doing wrong?
I have been having problems with xNormal throwing up errors too. I'm thinking that its possible a bug as the vert. index error even pops up if you use the unchanged LP mesh as the cage in xNormal 3.17.5, but everything works ok in 3.17.0.
I just did some tests with 2.49b, and i get the same results. 2.49b had a rock solid obj exporter, so im not sure what is going on.
I will report this as a bug and see what Jogshy says.
As for a work around, im currently making cages with xNormal's 3d viewer, so maybe that is worth a shot? The only issue is that, if you have smoothing groups, it splits the cage.
It may also be worth rolling back to an earlier version of xNormal for a while.
About the vertex order changing- it's an error message I get in XNormal. I even get a different vertex order change on shape keys of the low-poly mesh with the verts slightly pushed out. The only time the order matches up exactly is when the cage's vert positions are completely identical, which really is of no use to me...
So you mentioned you do your bakes in Xnormal, any hints as to what I might be doing wrong?
Jogshy figured out what the issue was. If you disable the "shortest diagonal" in the default triangulator (via the plugin manager) it fixes the cage problem
Replies
Since the devs. implemented the new tangent basis, i though i would do a little test to see what everything looked like. It seems they managed to match to the GLSL shader, Baker and the Rendering engine 100%
To illustrate how you can use one smoothing group (if the the Tangent basis of the Baker matches the engine), see below
Top row is HP, bottom is LP
No tricks, i promise
There's going to be a free version of this with restrictions, but I'd really like to see see Blender have this functionality... it's really missing a good, integrated crowd simulator.
Thanks!
I must admit, i was pretty pleased with the results
Do you get an error message, or is this something you have noticed?
That means that you dont have an image assigned to the object you are trying to bake to.
Make sure you assign a new image to your LP while it is in edit mode. Then select the HP and shift select the LP and hit bake.
Honestly, I just export the cage from Maya and use that and the .obj from Blender, until we get something better.
Thanks
Whats going wrong without having a cage?
Using a cage allows you to set, and control, the perfect ray distance and direction for all parts of your mesh, so you get much cleaner bakes
Using uniform ray distances can cause the rays to miss parts of the HP mesh when baking which, in turn, causes things like seams and other errors in the normal map.
http://wiki.polycount.com/NormalMap?highlight=%28\bCategoryTexturing\b%29#Working_with_Cages
Basically, cages result in a more accurate bake and are a faster method to get consistently solid results.
Another question.. I don't know if this is going to make sense but I'm getting the lo poly model showing up in the bake. I'm trying to bake cross sections though an object and get all the information there, so the end result would be like an MRI scan. When I make the object transparent in the material or hide it from the outliner I get the no image error from before
edit: so the question is, whats the best way to get the low poly mesh out of the bake?
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1693140/blender.jpg
I want to get the texture of the sphere without the plane in it to get a proper alpha. I made the plane purple so you can obvously see it appearing in the bake at the bottom....
thanks for taking the time to help
Is that what you mean?
*edit*
It seems like Blender wont make an alpha for this if you bake like that
As a work around, give the Sphere a diffuse colour of Black and bake "textures". You can then invert it or whatever you need
HMMMMM actually if I set my alpha of the material to 0.001 it comes out good enough for me....
You prob. know this, but if you open a .blend through the file menu, you can uncheck "Load UI" which will keep your default 2.5x theme.
Take a look at rigify, its pretty cool. Some youtube tutorials on how it works and it comes with 2.5+ in the plugins menu.
edit: [ame]
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1693140/blender2.jpg
I haven't actually got the normal baking to work, nothing happens when I select normal's from the option, but I'm not actually using normals at the moment so haven't looked into further.
Anway, the diagram shows that the rays terminate on the first poly it hits going outwards (green x) rather than the last one(red x). Meaning that you get the backside of any floating or overlapping details you attach.... Sounds a bit of a downer on the baking tools.
Again the pluple/red poly is casting and the baked image is at the bottom.
edit: I got normal map baking working and it does the same thing.
From what I remember it would be better if the tool actually traced back towards into the model from the max distance and then terminated on the first point it hit.
You need to move the LP plane above any objects you wish to bake onto it
Is this what you want to achieve?
I think a thread renaming is in order now too...It's more of a generic Blender thread now
Get it? Beetle Juice? Because your avatar is a Ghost? Beetle Juice was a movie with such ethereal based stuff? So you drink it? Get it? Anyone? No? Yes? No? No?
...
...
...
I'm just looking for some love!
Is that some reverse psychology I detect; to get the Blender haters to come to this thread so they can find out how awesome it is?
Beatlegeuse is the ghost with the most! Beatlegeuse! Beatlegeuse! Beatlegeuse!
for 99 percent of rigging purposes rigify will do the trick.
i mean it works with the default humanoid rig that comes installed with blender and once you learn about its tagging system you can do just about any kindof rig you want, you can also add new types of rigs to it so that 1 percent of rigs you cant do you can easily add into it if i recall.
No not really, the point applies to all baking so when you are baking a proper low poly mesh you will miss the details like the ball as you cannot move it mesh in that case.
The box, ball and plane are the simplest test but in a real example there could be something like a rivet or bolt on top of a small box on top of the high poly base that would get missed.
It's perfectly possible to bake floaters that are outside the LP
Depending on the asset, there are different ways you should set up your bake.
When you are baking objects like floaters onto a plane, the easiest way is to move the object you are baking onto, to be above the objects you want to bake. This works 99% of the time with just a default bake.
Any objects that are directly below the first mesh that the rays hit are occluded and not shown on the normal map
For things that are more complicated, like a regular LP asset, you just need to tweak the Distance and bias by small amount.
In the example below, the slot is outside the LP mesh but the rays are projected to the correct length because the Bias and Distance are set correctly. The value i used for it are Distance =0.200 Bias =0.100
Hope that helps
What kind of voodoo be this WHERE BE THE MONKEYS????
Although maybe I'm missunderstanding what bias does.... It helps a little in tests.
While baking with cages would be ideal (and i still use xnormal, because of this and its speed), you can still get some pretty decent results without them.
I did a bake test with (Distance 0.00, Bias 0.010). There are a few errors, but it certainly does very well.
In the mean time, maybe this info of a possible shortfall will help anyone who's missing multiple layers of info from bakes.
The strange thing in all this is the bias and I can't quite work out what it's doing.
edit: I mean't to ask did you sculpt it in blender?
I didnt sculpt or create the model. It's from this tutorial from Eat3d.
I like this has become a super thread for Blender tbh, and i prefer to have everything in on place, rather than having loads of smaller threads. Currently i see this thread as a kind of sound board for Blender related goodies.
I dont think its so way off topic though, as apart from the odd small derailing, it still about new projects, features and how Blender is upping its game and competing with the big apps.
About the baker...Distance controls the maximum distance that the LP and HP meshes are away from each other and Bias sets a bias toward objects that are further away.
*edit* w00t! 1024 posts ftw
If anything doesn't make sense, I will try my best to explain further.
About the vertex order changing- it's an error message I get in XNormal. I even get a different vertex order change on shape keys of the low-poly mesh with the verts slightly pushed out. The only time the order matches up exactly is when the cage's vert positions are completely identical, which really is of no use to me...
So you mentioned you do your bakes in Xnormal, any hints as to what I might be doing wrong?
Thanks! That pretty much shows I was wrong and the bias does fix the problem!
I have been having problems with xNormal throwing up errors too. I'm thinking that its possible a bug as the vert. index error even pops up if you use the unchanged LP mesh as the cage in xNormal 3.17.5, but everything works ok in 3.17.0.
I just did some tests with 2.49b, and i get the same results. 2.49b had a rock solid obj exporter, so im not sure what is going on.
I will report this as a bug and see what Jogshy says.
As for a work around, im currently making cages with xNormal's 3d viewer, so maybe that is worth a shot? The only issue is that, if you have smoothing groups, it splits the cage.
It may also be worth rolling back to an earlier version of xNormal for a while.
*EDIT* it looks like the issue has been reported by other people too and they are having problems with the newer version.
http://eat3d.com/forum/questions-and-feedback/xnormal-cage-error
No problem