Comments on: Creating and Using Shadow Maps

By: Rai

Rai — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 17:39:14 +0000

Hey, great tutorials thanks to them i tried making sculpts again and succeeded this time xD

Anyways i had problem with baking ambient occlusion and i couldn’t find answer here so i googled a bit and found answer. Now i know the answer i think you should mention it here, but i might be wrong i’m a novice at this: my problem was that for some reason ambient occlusion was turned off in rendering (no idea why) so i had to go to world tab and turn it on. Before i did it whole image rendered was black and no matter what settings (i even through i broke the blender xP) then turned it off and bam there it was with no problems.

By: Murgy

Murgy — Wed, 28 Dec 2011 02:23:20 +0000

If its not giving you any sort of error it could be that the mesh somehow got turned inside-out. Easiest way to tell with sculpties is to import the sculpt into SL and see if the sculpt looks inside-out in world.

But you can also just turn the mesh inside-out again and see if that fixes the problem. For a symmetrical mesh like this, you can do it by going into Edit Mode, selecting all your vertices, then pressing M > X (mirror along the X axis). Then bake the ao again. Another way to do it is by flipping your normals, but your sculpt will still be inside-out in SL and you’ll have to correct that in world.

By: Paradoxical

Paradoxical — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 05:00:35 +0000

Hey Murgy,
I did want to thank you again for your work on this fantastic tutorial. I have since had more success with Blender following your guide, but I’ve hit another snag. I’ve made a quick Booney Hat to showcase the error I’m getting, for some reason the base of the hat itself renders Ambient Shadows perfectly. How ever, the small embossed band does not render anything at all. I’ve bound the new image as correctly as I can tell, (making it in Edit Mode with all of the vertices selected and applied multier) but for some reason, when I go to bake the image, it calculates for a while (like it would normally if it was actually writing shadows) and turns the entire image black. It does not make any sense. The base sculpt renders in the cast shadow of the object, but it refuses to bake the objects shadow itself.

Any ideas?

http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/163/78373174.jpg/

By: Aeris

Aeris — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 11:25:02 +0000

the way around it… to Mirror the mesh to x local. It brings up the object inside out, but it renders the ao map correctly,. Plus, it renders the sculptmap properly (not inside out, either). Double Win!

By: Aeris

Aeris — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 07:42:04 +0000

HI and thank you for your excellent tutorial, which has single-handedly helped me overcome my frustration with sculpts for SL.
I have a problem though, with the ambient occlusion:
When I copy an item ( say, a sleeve), mirror it to go on the other arm, do some finalising sculpting… my lovely sleeve is ready. However, when I try to bake an ambient occlusion on this mirrored object, it comes out near black, there is a little bit of grey but it seems like the whole thing is inside out (i.e. parts that should be light, are dark, and vice-versa). Which makes sense considering it is a mirrored object. Is there a way to get the ambient occlusion to work properly in this case? Thanks in advance. Best wishes, Aeris

By: Murgy

Murgy — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:01:31 +0000

Find the Tab labeled “Multires” in the Edit buttons and switch the Level to 1. If you’re having trouble finding the multires tab, try doing a Google search.

Also keep in mind that I’m still using Blender 2.49. If you’re using Blender 2.5 or higher, then I can’t help you much with the interface.

By: Amber

Amber — Mon, 18 Jul 2011 18:25:21 +0000

I dont understand how to switch to multires level 1

By: Sherry

Sherry — Thu, 21 Apr 2011 19:23:06 +0000

Wonderful tutorial! Thank you so much for this resource!

By: Jonno

Jonno — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 08:40:32 +0000

It’s possible to feed in two or more texture sources, merging them. This can be a colour texture and a shadow map. If you have used simple UV Texture mapping, and haven’t got different UV maps for your leather and AO shading, this is “reasonably” simple. But it probably won’t seem that way the first time you try it. The instructions here are for 2.49.

First save both your textures to the hard drive, say leather.tga and ao.tga.

Now you need to create a material: shading/material buttons (F5), Links and Pipeline, Add New. Rename the Material something sensible. This will create a material and a material index (a mesh material slot number), assign the material to the index, and assign all faces to the index. All by pressing Add New. In short this means what you do next will apply to the entire sculpty.

Next you need to add two textures to the material.

To do the first, go to the texture buttons (F6), and in the Texture panel Add New. Rename it leather_texture. You will see it appear at the top of the texture stack, a column of 10 or so slots. Now in Texture Type select Image. Two more panels will appear. In the Image Panel, use the selector to pick leather.tga, associating your leather image with the leather texture.

Now do the second: click on the second slot in the texture stack under leather_tetxure, Add New and rename it ao_texture. Set Texture Type to image, and associate the texture to ao.tga using the selector in the image panel as before.

Now back to the shading/material buttons (F5). You will also see another view of the texture panel here, with the texture stack showing the two textures. Leather at the top, AO underneath. (The order is important, and the two chevrons to the right will let you reorder them.)

Select the leather_tetxure in the stack. Go to the Map Input and select UV. This will give the base texture.

Go back to the texture stack tab, click on ao_texture. Go to the map input tab and select UV. This will render on top of leather.tga as blender works its way down the stack. But you don’t want to override leather.tga completely, so now go to the Map To tab. Chage “Mix” to “Multiply”, using the texture blending mode selector, and move the Col slider below that selector to say 0.4. The higher the number, the greater the effect of the shading. You need to experiment to get the right number.

Okay final step. back to the 3D viewport, and into edit mode. Select all vertices. In the UV/Image window, create a new image of the final size you want to export into SL, probably somewhere between 256×256 and 1024×1024. In the Render menu, Bake Render Meshes – Texture Only.

This should create your combined leather/ao image. Save it to hard drive.

By: Vulture

Vulture — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 15:10:44 +0000

go to materials panel, in there find the world panel then Amb. oclussion tab, in there find Samples and increase the number of samples (the higher it is, the more time will take to bake the texture) that way it wont be so grainy.