Hi everyone. Right now i have a file that won’t render properly, and i would like some help with that, but it’s not the main reason i’m asking.
The real reason is that i have this problem all the time. The same problem, seemingly every time i go near blender. Something won’t bake as expected, or will give a plain black texture, or a plain grey texture with no shading, or will just plain refuse to bake with a cryptic error message. or bake wrong colours, strange patterns, etc.
I’m really getting tired of it, and tired of having to recruit new assistance every time. I feel like i understand some of the basic concepts of rendering. textures, lighting, specularity, ambient occlusion, etc. But blender’s veritable sea of settings and checkboxes, many often with similar names, leave me at a complete loss to diagnose the issue.
I’m wondering if someone could provide a sort of basic guide, a checklist of things to do when diagnosing an issue. What i do know from all these settings, is that there’s literally thousands of ways to screw up a project with one click. one tiny setting screws up everything. Like accidentally messing up the render layers, or turning off ambient occlusion, or not having lights on a currently active layer. I have no idea what most of those are though. It’s made me realise how little i know about blender, and how i know even less than i thought i used to, since it moved on from v2.49
As to the specific problem i have, the file is this: http://www.mediafire.com/?d9ace1o9gbwhg9c
It’s a sword that i’m trying to bake a copper material on. I’d like it to end up looking roughly like a copper/brass-ish orangey/brown-y metal. I would think this would be as simple as appending the material, applying it, and hitting bake. but it won’t work. the thing comes out grey, monotone, and generally lacking in detail. So i’d like some help with that problem if possible. But as i say just helping me with that alone probably won’t do much in the long run, i’ll run into more problems eventually and need more help. I’d really like to learn how to diagnose and solve these problems myself.
Any thoughts, advice, links to useful tutorials etc, are appreciated ^^
