Greetings Blender wizards!! So hoping someone can help me solve this mystery… I have watched countless videos on baking textures into a blender scene - with the end goal to create an OBJ for realistic 3d Printing. Nobody explains what is actually happening in the videos just a lot of click this … then this… then this… so, I’ve done all that with absolutely no idea of what or why I am doing it… but I’ve managed to get the scene to work where it exports really well to a fbx file… however, if I attempt to export to an OBJ which is what I’d like, within shading, the mapping for Texture and Mapping nodes disappear. If i re-add them, my object looks horrendous. I am going to take a lot more time trying to learn about texture baking and educate myself, but I am trying to make a holiday present for my friends with a model I’ve created of their dog who is going through health issues with cancer, and I know they will love it… I am really hoping someone can help me with creating the OBJ file and the modified scene to export the OBJ file and any pointers for me to learn for future such projects. Thank you so much for the time and help and any assistance you can provide me! I am including my original blender file before baking, after baking which works for a fbx object, the obj file export of that, then the fixed shading area within the obj file which I re-add the mapping nodes and what it looks like. Thank you times a billion for the help, and lessons =)
Here is a link to my onedrive of the blender scenes, pre-baked, baked with a working fbx, the exported FBX object, the OBJ object (from the scene titled working fbx)… and the scene I imported the OBJ into and attempted to fix the shading workflow resulting in the mutated horrendous object.
I don’t know the purpose of baking, but I’m using the wrong method. Not suitable for this modeling.
The 3D printer will not be printed in color unless it is a special equipment.
Normal maps are for 3D graphics, not for printers.
If necessary, it can be extracted using color images.
Thabks for the help again Kim, i believe baking is a way for embedding textured into a 3d object so you can 3d print. Companies will print your 3d models for prototypes, art projects etc etc and the majority support uploading an or obj, ply or other format that 3d coloured printers support with the textures baked in. At least thats my very limited understanding. Other than that the only bakjng ive done is for pie haha.
Hoping others may be able to add and give thoughts and waiting to hear back from various 3d printing companies on how they get the coloured textures mapped for printing… thank you for this!
Thank you !!! I wonder if it is because the program I used to make the 3D object was a gaussian splat converted to a 3D object which had the normals inverted… the quality was much better than what I was getting from photogrammetry programs and Reality capture was taking eons to render and looked horrible… thank you for taking so much time to look into this and provide this for me, it means a lot!!! I found this company in particular who will print small objects using a new super fancy colour printer-
I’ve asked them if they could take an fbx and convert it… but if I can get the PLY using what you’ve provided that’s great! Perhaps I will also try to invert the original Splat that was converted into an OBJ from the app I used and retry the texture baking. Thank you for the mind food and again for all the time you’ve taken to help me!! =)
So that’s funny! I will see what they say maybe they can take the fbx file that’s already working or do what you’ve suggested (and their website says) and give them a VRML… maybe they will come back with something else all together haha. I’ll try export the VRML though… I didnt know that was even still a format used =P
I don’t know exactly why you marked VRML.
There is an Addon that supports most file formats in blender, including PLY. You can install an Addon that meets your requirements.
Add…
The blender has an Addon that can review problems with 3D printer files. Try it
A normal texture is a special kind of texture. It is purely an optical illusion that converts RGB data to XYZ data and the result is based on the shading depending on the viewing angle. These maps are not actual geometrical detail on the model, it is noting more than a shading trick.
You need a displacement map if you want to print this detail. A displacement map is geometry based. It is possible to convert normal data to height/displacement data, but the results are a bit hacky and the quality is not anywhere close to what you would get from a dedicated displacement map.
Your model needs to have enough geometry to capture the detail too.
It can be done in Blender using the displace modifier and the normal map as the input, but as I said, the results won’t be great and you will need the geometry to support it. Worth a try in your case though.
Thank you for this… it’s nice to know and you’ve said it very elegantly… observing the mesh itself it looks not so great… so, this gives me a lot to look into and consider, perhaps back to the drawing board… and thank you for this =) Happy Holidays!
I just had a look at your file and there is practically zero information on the normal map so you can dismiss my post above.
The colour map is solely responsible for the final result, so it’s a case of creating a more stylised piece to print and do some manual sculpting, unless you can find printing service that can deal with a wide enough range of colours to represent the photo scan texture faithfully.
Thanks Danny. Gives me something to work on =)… there’s a printing company in chicago that has one of the new fancy 100K coloured printers that can print it… but, no idea yet what they would quote, and also feel I need a better overall mesh mwefore spending any money on that ! Thanks again for the help!!
