Shader baker settings?

KevinLQ

Whenever I try to bake the textures from an object, the produced texture is always extremely grainy and/or completely off. I position/rotate the object I want according to the lighting to bake the texture, then I select the object, and go to shader baker. I've tried various bake settings, including really low values, as well as everything maxed. Nothing works, it all produces an unusable grainy texture.
Does anyone know how the shader baker works?? I'm only baking textures of simple object, like a tube, sphere, bottle, etc.

KevinLQ

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Szark

I would assume not.

What lights are you using and and what are your advanced render settings?

Bejaymac

Lack of information, no idea what it is, think it has something to with ShaderMixer so avoid it, etc etc, I could probably go on for several more lines about why nobody has answered, but I wont.

First thing is that this isn't so much a "shader baker" it's more of a texture baker, it burns the surface settings on your object onto a texture, and within the UV coordinates of the object.

The second thing is you only use lights if you want to burn specularity and/or shadows onto the texture, most of what I do with this is turning tileable textures into texture maps, so I usually "turn off" specularity (0% Gloss, black, 0% strength).

Third and probably the most important, is that it has it's own render settings, and that you need to set them up for insane quality to get the best results, or as close to insane as this will allow, Max out Pixel Samples & shadow samples, and turn down the shading rate as far as it will go, all the way down to 0.10.

Then there is the finished texture size, no point in using a 600x600 map tiled 10 times and then putting it on a 2000x2000 texture, the larger the finished texture the better it will look.

Unless they have changed things it also only works as is with the default surface shader, you can get it to work with the shader mixer if you use the Baker brick in your shader, I'm not entirely sure but I think it also only works with the default DS lights, so things like UE2 and other shader based lights probably wont work.

Szark

It doesn't so much bake the texture on to the surfaces but Bakes the light, shadow, specualer and AO etc on to the textures and exports these textures as new texture maps. Well that is how it was in DS3A...I think...it's been a while since I have used it. :)

EDIT: I should learn to read slowly. bejay said it all

KevinLQ

Screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/ePlo0qz.png

The "texture" created is just a solid black square, despite taking like 20min to bake it... O_o
While for other models the texture baked is a near-solid black with really grainy details.

I have lights in the scene, I set the diffuse colour as pink, ambient colour as grey, and everything else as white. The screenshot shows my shader baker settings.

Richard Haseltine

Your item is UV mapped? I just tried it, with bake Illumination ticked and bake shaders unticked, and it worked.

Joe Cotter

KevinLQ said:

I'm only baking textures of simple object, like a tube, sphere, bottle, etc.

I'm guessing by this statement that you hit the nail on the head Richard, no UV map?

Marieah

I've found that if you do everything described here - slow render...big map...and then open the texture produced in Photoshop (or which ever editor you use) and enhance it, you can get very good results.

If you are baking shaders you can apply any bump/dispacement maps to the diffuse channel and bake those as well. They will need some sharpening.

One thing to watch out for. You can't choose the name for the baked map, and if you are baking more than one map from an outfit, the files will overwrite automatically and there's no preventing this. So save each map to a new folder and rename them afterwards.

Mr Rid

Am not getting this to work in DS 4.5.0.114, x64.

- in Editor, select all surfaces on the Genesis figure
- set Shader Baker file path
- check 'Bake Shaders' & 'Auto Apply' (tried both bake modes)
- bake

It only ever exports a black image labeled "3_SkinFoot" which is the last surface selected (?).

What I really want is to condense all the color maps in particular into one texture map that can be exported along with the obj, then load/apply in Lightwave.

Jaderail

Just select Genesis in the tree that SHOULD select all the figure and zones.

Szark

Do you know what Baking does and did you know we have Texture Atlas in DS4.6 Pro to do the job of making one texture map out of many.

Mr Rid

Thanks all!

Yes, I know what baking does. But in DS 4.5 is only resulting in a black map. I dont really need to bake in Daz, I just want to condense the maps to use in LW. I'll try DS 4.6 Pro. *sigh* installing yet another version of Daz... something always breaks. *fingers crossed*

Bejaymac

Figures have overlapping UV mapping, the attached pic shows V4.2's "skin" areas, as you can see it's a mess, if that was just on one texture then it would be unusable, this is why they have multiple surfaces and textures.

To get what you want means redoing the UV mapping on the figure, and then making new textures as the old ones wont work any more.

Mr Rid

Yes, you would either have to arrange and stitch all maps side by side in one new map (in Pshop), and edit the current UV to fit (I'm using Lightwave), which is very tedious to do manually (I dont yet know what Texture Atlas does). Or generate a 2nd UV with non-overlapped surfaces, and generate/bake all current maps into one new map, like using Lightwave's Surface Baking Camera. Its quick to do in LW, but wanted to see how Daz handles it.

But even if using Shader Baker in DS 4.5 as is, it is only generating a useless black map here.

Bejaymac

davidridlen said:

But even if using Shader Baker in DS 4.5 as is, it is only generating a useless black map here.

Check the surface settings on the item, chances are it isn't using the default surface shader, as only it and properly set up Shader Mixer shaders can be used with Shader Baker.

Takeo.Kensei

You just have to use Texture Atlas to get what you want. No need to bake

With Texture Atlas, you'll get all in one texture at the size of your choice as well as a new UV map

I don't think you need to update to DS 4.6 but it's better anyway than DS 4.5

Szark

Yep I agree

Szark said:

Do you know what Baking does and did you know we have Texture Atlas in DS4.6 Pro to do the job of making one texture map out of many.