I’m having issues with trying to bake a scene I made. I have many objects, a bunch of them with their own UV maps and textures, and I’d like to join them all together into one object with one UV map and one texture so that I can bake it as one. Things I’ve tried:
-Joining all objects together, then trying every type of UV unwrap–this ends up with all the UV maps overlaying each other and textures becoming misaligned and messed up.
-Duplicating all objects, joining the duplicates together, and trying to bake the textures of the originals into a new image on the duplicates. This ends up taking forever, with things ending up mostly black and still odd-looking.
-Baking everything separately then joining them… again, textures become messed up.
I’ve watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials and have tried following along with answers I’ve found in this forum, but with no success. Could anyone offer me some advice?
Here’s the file if you’d like to take a peek: Forest.blend (3.68 MB)
Most objects have unapplied scale. When the scale is also non-uniform, UV unwrap won’t work well because the mesh dimensions don’t match what you’re seeing in the viewport. Blender warns about it but the warning is easy to miss.
Object mode, select one object, shift+G -> type, ctrl+A -> scale to apply.
It’s possible to unwrap many objects as one with the help of Texture Atlas addon. The addon joins the objects, adds a TextureAtlas UV, and you could also bake while they’re joined. Cycles baking workflow is a pain without other addons but as one object the materials are also there which are easier to go through. Maybe copypaste the bake image node in each material for baking.
No images were packed in the .blend so could test that, but unwrapped with smart unwrap and baked ambient occlusion.
Tree trunks that stick through the ground take space on the UV map so might want to trim them, maybe with bisect tool. Still though, the trunks are skinny and don’t pack that well, maybe it would be better to bake multiple groups of objects on multiple images, and/or have trees share texture space afterwards so they don’t waste so much space.
Thank you so much for your quick response! I tried what you suggested, and the scaling I think helped but I’m still stuck. When I attempt to use Texture Atlas it completely messes up my textures still.
[ATTACH=CONFIG]470179[/ATTACH]
I even tried using Smart Lightpack and that didn’t work.
However now after everything has scale applied, when I join the objects and just do a normal unwrap everything looks good… except for the ground. I don’t know why everything else would look great except for the ground.
I’m re-uploading the file with the images packaged in… sorry I missed that earlier! I don’t see how I can upload it onto here again, so I uploaded it to Google Drive (I hope that’s allowed?): https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2qBRR30UYv5N0puM0dqZ1hNTTA
Is there perhaps a way to export this as a single 3d model with all textures applied? Then I can re-import it into a new Blender scene and add lights, then bake? I feel like this should be a simple thing, since the modeling and texturing is all done, I ultimately just want to upload it to SteamVR. Thanks again for any advice you can offer!
Yes, this is quite a mystery. I’ve watched videos for two weeks, & still can’t do it. There is a great deal of conflicting information out there. I am convinced that there isn’t anybody who knows how to bake reliably. I’m going to throw away everything I’ve ever heard about baking, & start from scratch & find out myself. If I get this resolved, I’ll send you my textfile on how to get baking to work.
