if any hasn’t noticed yet have a look at this link showing the texture baking being built for next version of blender… you’re going to be able to bake normal maps too!!
http://www.blender.org/cms/Render_Baking.827.0.html
you can download recent builds here
hmm… i wonder if there is an option to only bake shadows… would be really usefull
“Bake Ambient Occlusion, skips any lighting apart from the AO setup & Bake Normals this is the normal in camera space. Tangent space normals will be added…”
Yes yes …it getting better and better :>
wessx
I guess thats a nice way to fake shadows
lol it’s the only way to fake shadows accurately…(just one of the uses) it’s very important process that is used widely in all 3d apps especially when making games… the real question will be is how well will it be able to unwrap the object to give good pixel coverage when the texture is rendered… it’s a very useful and powerfull tool to add to the blender toolbox… can’t wait to start using it…
You don’t need to unwrap manually your mesh to use this feature, use the archimap uv unwrapper, included in the UV scripts menu.
I know texture baking is going to improve the quality of blender games for me at least. I’m not real good at drawing, or painting, but I can sculpt. Imagine being able to take a high poly normal mapped Make Human model and apply it to your low poly mesh! And am I just faint with anticipation or did I see Multi-level uv editing?!
Now all I want for Christmas is a little button in the texture face box that says ‘bump map’ linked to a uv level.
Simply awesome!