I am working with Blender now for about two years - mainly modeling - and try now to wrap my head around materials/textures.
There is one aspect that drives me crazy, though, and I can not find any tutorial that tackles the issue, nor did I find any forum entries regarding it, so I really hope somebody here can solve that riddle for me, - otherwise I am getting nowhere.
The issue is the following:
I set up a material (in this example kinda brass), define an extended material node for it (diffuse and specularity mixed to the output), put out a model (monkey to test), set up a three point light setting with point lights and a camera;
if I look at the object in the 3D view with the shading in the view port switched to GLSL it looks exactly like in the material preview, and if I render it from camera view I get the ‘same’ good results; - (see attachment screen #1)
But then (after making a UV unwrap of the model) when I bake the texture for the object (and look at it with shading set to Multitexture) the texture is totaly ‘dull’ - very different to the material in the preview and it looks totaly not what the preview indicates. (see screen #2)
What did I miss here?
How do I get the render quality of the material onto the texture I bake out for further use?
Advice would be really really appreciated;
You have decided to not to show us how do you use baked texture image. That’s bad, however we probably could deduct that you use it to set Color properties for the Suzanne’s material. Have you set anything aside this one texture while observing it in Multitexture mode? GLSL would have been better with proper lighting, still…
Do you have normalmap baked to tell blender to reflect light on small sculpted/noise textured bumps and scratches on Suzanne to make it more believable?
Do you have specular map(texture) available to determine reflective places on Suzanne and strength of reflectivity ? Reflection map - something resembling surrounding objects, sky to reflect in it?
So, what you see is as if real brass monkey would be wrapped in a one layer of colored paper, not a glossy one.
Textures need more to show off. Or you need more textures applied to proper blender(another renderer, game engine) channels. Choose both.
I think i understand what is the problem and can reproduce it simply, see in the attached blend for what i describe :
in the blend there is :
a model that is unwrapped and in the uv/image editor a black texture is assigned to it
the model has a material setup for it
rendering and GLSL textured viewport show the same exact thing :
Now in the Bake menu, set it to Full Render if it’s not (as it’s what is rendered that we want to be baked) and click Bake.
The texture will be created.
Press N then in the display switch to Multitexture instead of GLSL to see what that baked texture look when applied to the model :
The baking in fact does not have baked the light effect/shading of the render, despite the setting is on “Full Render”.
I’m not sure if there’s a setting to make really the “Full Render” being baked, but i never used the full render setting on my models baking session so i have no idea.
I am well aware that the material I set up to simulate the brass is pretty simplisitc, - it consists of four textures to give it some grain and reflectivity, but it could surely be done much better by somebody who knows what they are doing - I am really still making my first material steps;
but the problem is not so much that the material is not realistic, but more the fact that when I bake out the texture, it looses the specularity and makes the result ‘dull’.
I’m guessing that baking any kind of lighting into a model is not very useful because then it’s nothing but a 2D image and can’t be lighted or moved around without looking weird.
