I've broken my baked texture and I don't know how to fix it.

[trsix]

Hello,
As the title says, I have broken something that only shows up in baking but not in the normal cycles render preview.

I have attached 2 files (hopefully they are attached).
They are both versions of my kitchen I am making.

The first one is the working one where when I bake, the texture looks perfectly fine.

The second one, the texture has a bunch of marks all over the place and I cannot figure out why it is doing that.

The second one is more complex, but as far as I know, that’s the only difference.

So, if I bake the first file (kitchen_detail_v1.blend), with the render samples at 500, when the bake has finished, the texture view looks moderately fuzzy but overall it’s a good rendition.

If I bake the second file (named kitchen_detail_v3_problems.blend), the texture looks like the attached image at the bottom of this post.

If I cycles render preview either file, the cycles render preview looks great (after about 200, then gets progressively better and more smooth as I increase the samples)

I even set the render samples to 5000 on the v3 file and went to bed. When I woke up the next day, the texture looked exactly like the one below, but it was softer so the extra samples did do something but something else has happened in the v3 file that is not present in the v1 file. I don’t think this is related to the samples level.

I have set the samples to the exact same on both files yet the textures come out different. I don’t know what I did.

I have gone over the two files trying to find differences but I can’t seem to find any (besides vert counts, and additional textures and more geometry)

I have re-baked, I have re-lightmap patched at 512/1024/2048, changed the quality from 12 to 24, changed the margin, removed all linked images, removed all linked textures, restarted blender/computer, changed samples from 12 to 5000, reset all textures…

I am literally at a loss here. I don’t know where to go from here besides starting with the v1 file again and that is just really grinding me that I can’t find the problem.

I’m not a complete newbie, but I am obviously missing something here. If I have failed to include any information please let me know.

I think I got it all.

The attached image shows the granularity in the texture I am having the problem with. I will post another couple images showing the v1 render and the cycles preview render from the v3 file.

Thanks for looking/helping.

Kitchen_detail_v3_problems.blend (948 KB)
Kitchen_detail_v1.blend (629 KB)

[trsix]

This is how the v1 file looks in texture view after I bake it at 200 samples, notice there is very slight granularity.

And this is what the v3 file looks like if I let cycles preview render it to 700 samples

This is what the v3 file looks like if I bake it at 700 (or 200, or 5000) samples

[cubicApoc]

Your texture resolution isn’t high enough.

[trsix]

Are you talking about the lightmap texture? I set that at 2048… Is that not high enough?

[cubicApoc]

It depends on how it’s unwrapped. For single objects, 2048 is usually enough, but this is a whole kitchen. Try 4096 and see if it improves. If it does, keep increasing the resolution until it looks good.

[trsix]

Well, I guess that’s what’s going on. It’s significantly less granulated at 4096

Thanks!

Although this does now make me question.

Am I doing the right thing. Should I continue to make this bigger and bigger? What are the drawbacks? Is there some other way I should be doing this? I think I’ll start a new thread and ask the question.

Thanks again by the way.