I have a boring tiling texture that I made more interesting by using the Ambient Occlusion node.
When I add plants the AO is overkill and there seems to be no way of making the AO ignore specific objects or materials.
So I figure the solution is to bake the result of the AO node.
Problem is I scaled the UVs far beyond the 0-1 range.
How do you bake in this situation?
Will I have to fit all the UV’s within 0.1 and then use texture coordinates in the material to recreate the same sizing?
Create a new UV set and bake to that one.
Bake ao into vertex colors? Yes, it will be very “low resolution” compared to textures, but if you only need ao for shader mixing, then it might not be very noticeable.
now to find that one tutorial that didn’t skip mentioning a step in the baking process again.
If objects have to be of the same geometry and location in order to bake, but the ambient occlusion is affected by nearby/overlapping geometry, how do you get the AO to bake to the other object?
any chance you could show me how it’s done?
https://ambientcg.com/view?id=Bricks059
lowpoly-tower4 BAKE.blend (592.8 KB)
Baking reduced test case.
I know I have actually done this successfully before, but don’t know why it’s not working now.
Original UVmap is circular.
Bake destination uv layout is straightened.
If baking worked the new image would have a line of color going across. Instead I’m getting an exactly duplicate of the original image with the circular paint.
XP25 bake to different UV layout.blend (296.4 KB)
@Mostach89
1 year ago
Using the UVMap node didn't work for me,
It kept baking the texture on the original UV coordinates.
What I did was once the secondary UV was created,
I set up the old UV map as Active Render and
clicked on the new UV in the properties panel, then baked it.
It seems to choose the highlighted UV Map as the output for me.
Im using 3.4.1
Because for some reason Cycles doesn’t take the attached UV map node into the consideration. I meant to file a bug for this. You need to literally “click select” the right UV map in the UV map list in the mesh data pane. I don’t think you need to change the active UV.
Thanks. I just found that out a minute ago.
My Problem now is that the baked result doesn’t look the same as the source image.
what I’m baking
what gets baked
Does the view transform color setting affect the bake rendering process? No, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
The result of the mix nodes seems lighter and less saturated than the bake result when shader displacement is disabled.
When shader displacement is enabled, the result of the mix nodes seems darker and more saturated.
Baking diffuse color only returned solid black images almost all of the time.
Baking as emission (again) is giving identical results to the mix nodes this time.
However, when dispacement is enabled, the mix nodes look different from the baked image.
lowpoly-tower4 BAKE.blend (626.3 KB)
So…just to run through the steps.
You created a new map (this example renamed to brickUV), selected UVMap (new map), went into UV Editing tab, scaled down/adjusted them. Then in your shader tab, you created a blank image in image node, with the adjusted UVMap connected, the original (brickUV) UVs connected to your original material group:
So…the image node and the new UVMap both need to be selected for baking.
For a color bake, contributions (lighting) need to be turned off for a flat diffuse.
Black bake outputs might be from contributions turned on or some other issue with your current setup.
Are you asking me or telling me? I think only the bake destination image node has to be selected.
Baking diffuse worked half of the time. I don’t know why. Baking emission worked all the time but about 4 out of 50 times the bake result very much did not match the original mixed texture nodes. That happened with both diffuse bake and emission bake.
I’m using daily build by the way. In the stable build I get the same difference in color with displacement activated but no black bakes so far.
If you still have the old UV map selected as active in the UV Map section, it can end up just baking the texture to the old uv map (just the uv map section within the boundaries). At least I’ve had that issue in the past.
I’m on an older version of Blender 3.4.1, not sure if there’s an issue with the newer blender.
