Hi everyone. I’m having some issues with baking and using the multires modifier. (i’d call this a modelling, not a rendering problem)
Ok, see this image below. Here we have a very angular object that i’ve created. This is the base/final mesh i’ll be using, because of tight poly limits. As you can see, there are noticeable lines where the edges of triangles occur, baked onto the AO texture. I would like the texturing to look smooth, and fake a higher quality than the mesh actually has, because that’s what all the cool kids do, right ?
So here below is the same mesh with a little bit of multires applied, and a new AO texture baked. As you can see it looks much smooother, and there’s no visible lines showing the mesh topology. I like this:
But there’s a big problem. As you can see, multires causes the sharp parts of my mesh to become more smoothed and rounded, (which is good i think) but it also moves vertices around and significantly changes the shape of the mesh. As a result, when i try to apply this new texture to the lower resolution mesh, it looks like this:
All the spikes have black parts at the tip, where there’s no texture because the shape of the UVs was reduced, and the pointy parts taken inwards. This happens even with the smallest possible amount of multires
Any idea what i can do to make this work better, besides manually photoshopping the texture ? All i want is a good texture baked nto a low quality object, which as i understand is a common technique.
is there any way to make blender more accurately preserve the shape of the mesh, while also making it look smoother ?
I don’t know if i will be much of help here but here is my suggestions:
I have understood that multires doesn’t work well with triangles because of the algorithm beyond it. I might be wrong.
Try to give multires more vertices to play with or give some volume to those black sharp part of the mesh
I m getting a little confuse about your workflow, so did you bake AO into a mesh without multires? did UV unwrapped the mesh before before the AO?
I don’t know if i will be much of help here but here is my suggestions:
I have understood that multires doesn’t work well with triangles because of the algorithm beyond it. I might be wrong.
Try to give multires more vertices to play with or give some volume to those black sharp part of the mesh
I only baked AO on the lowpoly mesh just for the purpose of showing this image. It’s easier to make out the geometry visually, than blender’s Solid draw mode. And yes i did the UVs before the AO (it’s impossible to NOT do that)
Maybe you need to bake from one level of multires to the other? I am not sure why you are using mutlires to get your texture AO to begin with if your final use is the lower poy version. If you are trying to get a smoother, cleaner AO result then just increase the samples in the AO settings under your world tab. Default is 5 I think, I bump mine to 30 or so and go get a drink while the computer bakes out the triangles
For the “why”, see the first picture. Even baking with the maximum samples (16 in the ui), it still doesn’t disguise the edges between triangles, which appear noticeably defined. I don’t see how 30 samples is going to improve that, as iirc the number of samples only governs the accuracy of the shading, and the detail of the “static” that gets baked into the texture.
Aside from that, baking AO is just one part of what im doing. Once i’ve got all this setup, i’d like to bake a thoroughly sculpted multires-ed mesh, so as to effectively create my own hair.
oops. I just realised i’ve not been looking at ambient occlusion settings, but at Anti Aliasing >.< i mist have just looked at the shape of the words and not read it too closely
And now that i’m definitely changing the correct setting, i can still confirm that it does nothing to fix this problem.
hi all x after a little messing around with it, i’ve discovered the Subdivide UVs checkbox on the multires modifier panel. Unticking it makes blender do pretty much what i want, without any need for adding more triangles.
