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Texturing with Shadow Maps

For some sculpties, slapping on a tileable texture from your inventory might work well enough.

Often, however, it looks better if you create a texture specifically for your sculptie. Sometimes this is even necessary to get the look that you want. The trouble is, how do you make a texture that fits your sculptie exactly?

I've often seen people use a colored and numbered grid to map out the general location of certain parts of a sculptie, then match it to the same grid in 2D format. While this method has its place, it can get pretty tedious.

There are features in Blender that will help us make textures for our sculpties relatively quickly. In this tutorial we're going to focus on baking ambient shadows, which is probably the fastest and easiest to understand method available in Blender.

In this tutorial, I ask that you have your screen split in half and one half switched to the UV/Image Editor.

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Change your 3D View drawtype by clicking on the menu that looks like one of these:

Change it to Textured (the first one) so you can see your mesh's assigned image wrapped around it.

Create a new image, size 256 x 256 or 512 x 512 and assign it to your mesh. Find the Bake tab and bake Ambient Occlusion instead of Textures. Save your new shadow map.

Paint a texture with your shadow map in your image editing software of choice.

Ambient Occlusion

Before we begin, I want to change the draw type in the 3D View to Textured. Find the small menu to the right of the Mode menu (marked in red - click the image to enlarge) and switch the draw type to Textured. If your sculptie is currently assigned a UV texture (such as a sculpt map), you'll see that texture placed onto your mesh in the 3D View.

If you've ever worked with other Blender sculptie templates, you may already know how to bake textures onto an image. However there are other types of images we can bake. The type we're going to bake now is Ambient Occlusion - or global shadows.

First we want to assign our mesh to a new texture. If you have multires on your mesh, you need to switch to Level 1 or Apply Multires before you change textures. Then go into edit mode and select All, by tapping A until all the vertices are yellow and the faces pink. Then in the UV/Image Editor, go to the menu Image > New. Make a new image that's 256 x 256 or 512 x 512. Hit OK. (If you switched to Multires level 1, you can now switch back to level 3)

Now go to the Scene > Render Buttons (marked in green - click the image to enlarge) and then find the Bake tab (blue) and change the bake type to "Ambient Occlusion" (yellow) and hit Bake. Wait a few moments for Blender to bake shadows onto your image. Save the image as something meaningful.

Usually this shadow map gives you enough 'landmarks' on the texture to be able to paint a texture that exactly fits your sculptie. Just use your favorite image editing software.

If you get black lines running through your shadow map, like the image above, this is something that happens in Blender sometimes, especially if there are faces on your sculpt that are twisted. Either paint these out, or blur them, or find some other means to get rid of them in your image editing software.
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After you've painted your texture, save it over the original shadow map. Then in Blender, in the UV/Image Editor division, go to Image > Reload to preview your new texture.

If you don't want to save over the shadow map, or you want to load a different image, go to Image > Open and browse to the image that you want to load into Blender.

You can assign your mesh to different images loaded in Blender by clicking on the small arrow button to the right of the UVs menu and selecting which image you want.

Remember that you have to be in edit mode, and you need to have all your vertices selected.

Previewing Your Texture

Testing your texture before uploading is incredibly easy. Simply save your new texture right over the file you saved from Blender. Then in Blender, reload the texture file by going to Image > Reload. Your new texture will be wrapped around your mesh. (Click image to enlarge)

Another Texture

You may at some point need to load an already-existing image into Blender for use as a texture. Go to Image > Open and find the texture you want and hit "Open Image."

Then in Edit Mode, and with all your vertices selected, find the drop-down menu next to the UVs Menu (marked in yellow - click image to enlarge). Click the small button with the arrows and select your new image. From this menu, you can also switch back to your old image, or to any image currently opened in Blender.

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Multiple meshes in the same .blend file will effect each others' ambient occlusion bake if they are close to each other.

If you want them to effect each other less, move them away from each other before baking.

Multi-Sculpt Bake

If you have more than one sculpt mesh in a single .blend file (see how here) then each mesh may effect the shadow baking of the others.

If you look at the image to the left (click to enlarge) you can see how the smaller mesh has created a dark shadow on the larger one.

Sometimes this is desirable, such as when you want a drop-shadow look on your group of sculpts, but if you'd rather they affect each other less or not at all, move the meshes away from each other before baking.

Note that this behavior can be useful if you need additional landmarks on your shadow map. For instance, if you want to place a logo or other decoration at a specific location on the mesh, you can add a new object to your file and place it at the desired location so ambient occlusion will bake a shadow on that spot.
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Remember to play around with what you've learned. Experiment. Be adventurous. Make mistakes.
Nothing in Blender is precious.

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