I am trying to create a mesh for a video game(irrlicht). I can create meshes and add uvmapped images to them - images. Whenever I create a procedural texture though, I cannot seem to uvmap it to the mesh so that when I export the texture stays.
Now, I’ve posted on the irrlicht forums, they are telling me that I must uvmap the texture…I know this. “UV” is selected under the “Map Input” section, that seems to have no effect. My exported mesh(3ds), has no texture to it outside of blender.
When I do the normal uvmapping, that is marking the seems, unwraping and opening up the uv images editor(like in all the basic tutorials) I only seem to have the option to use an image(I don’t want to use an image - I want to use my procedural texture).
Another thing, I have looked at “baking” the texture…I press F10, and try to bake it but get the error “No images foudn to bake” …so baking my texture(yes, my mesh is unwrapped) doesn’t seem to be working either.
So, the problem is that unwraping my mesh and using the uv editor only gives me the option to use images(so it seems), and the proceedural texture option doesn’t seem to export at all, even if uvmapping is selected.
How do I map my procedural texture so that will export for my game?
Thanks for your help.
Rendering in Blender seems to work just fine …the mesh looks exactly how I want to with the procedural texture…how the hell do I export it(my procedural textures) so it works in a video game engine?
You can’t use procedural textures for a mesh to be exported. Procedural textures are internal to Blender. They’re not really textures (in the image sense) but more mathematical constructs which are used to mathematically generate the appearance of an image texture.
There is a script however which can render the procedural texture to an image which you can then UV map as you have been doing with images. I’m not at a computer with Blender at the moment but you should be able to find it in the installed python scripts that come with Blender.
Ardee, you don’t need a script for that anymore, that’s what baking is.
Askjoe, you’ve almost got it. As mentioned, procedurals are created on the fly by the renderer/graphics engine, so they’re different even between things that use them; games only tend to use them for FX (e.g. Unreal’s FIRE engine). So you need to convert them to an actual image for use in other engines.
You need to assign a particular image to the faces you want to bake; so the baker has a place to put pixels and knows what size you want the image and all. I suggest making a new uv test grid of the size you want and making sure it will show up in a textured viewport in blender.
If it won’t bake textures or render after that, try AO; there’s a bug in some versions where something doesn’t always get initialized until you do an AO bake or something, then everything else works.
Star Weaver … I thought that baking was going to fix this issue to from everything I read but I ran into a problem. I created the texture - lets say clouds - and then went to baker. The baker, would tell me that no image was present so it wouldn’t work - to me, this defeats the entire purpose. The baker works fine if I uv an image, even several images…but I just have a texture, clouds that I want. I get the error, even under the AO. Is this the bug you’re referring to?
Do you consider this an acurate tutorial on how to bake?
Ask - I think so . . . If you’re wondering, the point of the baker is to “downmix” the colors (from light or from just material) which appear on the rendered object into a 2d texture map image that can be reapplied in a realtime (game) engine.