I know the title is very vague but I didn’t know how to put it in one sentence.
I have been working on a model for a sort of bizzare looking dragon and as I find it faster (and better looking) than if I were to make the textures via sculpt/paint etc I used the procedural materials and gave them all the mapping settings of “Object” and “cube” (this makes the scale material I made distribute much better all over the mesh) now this looks perfect on a single render, it’s crisp, it’s just the right settings I need for scales etc.
Now the problem is animation, with these mapping settings the texture does not look like it belongs to the mesh and looks like the texture is moving. I’ve run into this problem in the past before but this time it’s pushed me to my limit. I tried baking the normals and materials to my UV’s however the resulting map is grainy, it doesn’t look at all like the original texture and even worse even when increasing the size of the canvas to 4000x4000 it still looks pixelated and grainy, what gives?
I would like to know how to use the material I have rather than use UV’s and a pixelated baked image, how to I keep it on the mesh so that it looks like the skin belongs, is there a way to do it with nodes? I would really appreciate help on this because I need to finish this model (soon) as we are about to shoot the footage where I will afterwards need to animate and composite it and I would rather have a decent looking model than a grainy mess.
If you have gotten as far as you describe it would not be diffiult to bake.
select the dragon mesh – in edit press U – smart unwrap
put the UVs on a new image (choose your level of detail – 1024 or 2048 or possibly 4096 if you really want detail)
now, just go to the bake tab and set it to bake -->> textures. Save the image. This will be the color map
set it to bake normals -->> save the image as your normal map
you can do this for spec, or even mirror – whatever you want.
I already said I tried baking, I did all the steps you mentioned and it still ends up looking grainy and nothing like the original material, that is my problem, I don’t want to use UV’s because baking is extremely unreliable, which is why I am asking for another solution.
on the contrary, baking is the most reliable. But, I do understand your issue with graininess. Did you try to use the procedural textures with UV mapping? ie-- you can use a “cloud” texture with UV coordinates, then the cloud texture will bend and fold with the skin, and have the infinite detail possible with procedurals
That actually worked (the UV method, not the baking method), granted the seems are kinda obvious at the moment (a little adjustment will fix that) but the detail is unlimited and is exactly how I wanted! thanks you very much!