Baking textures

Game Engine Game Engine Support and Discussion
1

Hello,
I`m trying to figure what’s the best method for creating the scenes/levels for the project that i’m working on.

  • Bake all the materials, light and shadows in one single big texture
  • or keep separate textures for different objects in the scene and bake only the lights and shadows for the whole scene?

Thanks

2

The first option is suitable for high-end graphics cards (a lot of memory, and RAM to), the second one is a tile texture and the lighting map (there and AO) is also suitable for weak PCs.

3

Look into addon called textureAtlas
it will create/combine textures for you.

Best (fastest) way is to have all in 1.
great (manageable textures) way is to have separated textures.

It’s all up to you, aiming for last years PC’s, separated will be fine. Aiming for low end, combine as much as possible.

4

Yes, something like textureAtlas is what I was thinking… My goal is to find a fast an relatively easy workflow in order to create static (mainly) scenes for a platform/exploration game investing as little time as posible. Using Cycles for lightning a low poly stile scene seems to give me exactly the finish I’m looking for.
The All in One texture approach looks straightforward at first glance but i’ll need a fairly big texture that includes everything with enough resolution and i’m not sure what’s the limit there.

5

OK…
You have a room - 8x8x8m (cube). You arrange seamless textures of 512x512 pcs, for every two meters in the 2048x2048x2048 pcs, the real resolution of the walls of the room. Then you bake a 512 pcs light map. And you have on the output one texture tile 512 (+normal, +specular), and one 512 light map. But if you want to bake everything in one map (textureAtlas), you only need one texture for the room - 2048x2048x2048 pcs (+normal, +specular) = three textures, to get to the same quality in texture resolution. If these are not large and simple scenes (one / two rooms) - then it is better to bake one big texture, if large scenes and many objects are static - without a tile seamless texture probably can not do - otherwise you will have to increase the minimum system resources to the PC.
Like in Mirror’s Edge®, combined - tile textures and one light map.
There is still a small nuance of lighting for large maps - with static lighting baked shadows on the relief (normalmap) - this is good and not very much.

6

Hi, thanks for the advice… even if it left me a bit confused.
Lets take this concept as an example:

Sample-001.jpg1000×500 44.9 KB


Is basically a huge cave and an arch structure with the sun illuminating from outside.
I baked (diffuse and light/shadows) in a 4k image for texturing the whole place. I tried 2k but it was clearly not enough, too blurry.
As it is it has the same pixel density everywhere because I wanted to do it quickly and is still blurry. I suppose that for a final version I should redistribute the UVs giving more pixels to the areas that you can see closer.

  • Is a single 4k texture enough for a level like this?
  • Is it too big?
  • Can I bake the light and shadows independently and apply it on top to all the objects in the level while preserving each one with its own UV and texture?

Thank you very much

7
  • I do not see the texture there - only diffuse colour.
  • Is it too big?
  • 4k? 4096x4096 - probably a big, I did not see the whole scene. In general, in all offices there are PCs with minimal system requirements for the game - they will show whether it is big or not.
  • Can I bake the light and shadows independently and apply it on top to all the objects in the level while preserving each one with its own UV and texture?
  • yes, you can, and the amount of UV can be huge.

Thank you very much

  • no problems