REQ: texture baker

[youngbatcat]

I had a long talk with theeth about this and I still failed to show him why I am serious about this. So maybe someone else.

A texture baker is a simple behind the scenes tool that just does it’s thing. The thing it does is show a preview of a texture shader on a mesh. The preview does not take in radio or raytracing it just shows a fast image in the 3d view. The current shader preview in the material view window is just this, but it shows nothing of what will truly be on a mesh at all until you try a pre render.

Now a pre-render is the best way to truly see this image effect on the mesh, it is a boring waiting game. A typical pre-render without any fancy lighting and OSA turned off at a basic size image that is easy to see will take about a second or two per render depending on the size of the mesh. To quote theeth “boohoo”. Yes boohoo, but it is time and it is time off of work towards the prefect texture. And this does not even take into account an animation test. To add to this if you have to constantly tweak the settings and continue pre-renders it will add up time very very fast.

So the answer to this is how can we get the texture onto the mesh as an image. In the 3d view with potato texture mode a mesh that is uv mapped is viewable in realtime to rotate and transform the mesh however you like and the speed is unbelievable in how fast it renders a mesh as it is just realtime with a texture image applied to it.

I know of the ways to UV unwrap a mesh and render a texture then reapply it to the mesh as a Uv texture. But this is a slow process and is in contradiction to tweaking, each and every tweak will take time to render and save and open.

Also there is the method of applying vertex colors, but this will take a lot of mesh to show up the image at a reasonable detail to get anything from it. While a uv map can be applied onto a low poly cube and still have a great amount of detail to see.

So lets cut to the chase. Texture baking is needed badly. It will increase shader preview speed. I have asked the python scripters a lot for this but it seems no one can figure it out yet, though I would think it could be a better item in python script. Though C is faster.

It would also be great for the GameEngine. Anyone hate the idea of making Blender faster?

[TorQ]

While I would say that what you are requesting definetly isn’t needed “badly” (I can think of a coupla things that ARE needed badly) but it definetly would be nice to have.

TorQ

[theeth]

See, I didn’t say texture baking was impossible, I said expecting it to take less than a quick render would is ridiculous and wishful thinking.

Martin

[habalux]

I would love to have texture baking in Blender, and the ability to save the baked texture as a new texture I could use for my game models… I know already that it would give so much better results than my current render-unwrapped-mesh-from-above method. How long the baking process would take would be irrelevant for me

[youngbatcat]

well thats two. But now the question is, can python even do this ? and how would it ? I know there is no render command tools for python, the cel shader script was being hyped as a texture baker in some sort of way since it was rendering the mesh on the screen some how.

I dou’t realy know anything further until python can call renders, so I guess it is a python thing. On to .org site hope that might catch someone.

[theeth]

Can you learn to spell properly (and apply grammar too)? Not only will it make you text easier to read and to understand, it will also give you more credibility.

Martin

[youngbatcat]

Can you learn to spell properly (and apply grammar too)? Not only will it make you text easier to read and to understand, it will also give you more credibility.

Martin

Yeah I know I need to work on that.

Anyway.
Last one. Just for example Lightwaves version of bake.
http://www.newtek.com/products/lightwave/tutorials/rendering/lw_baker/lw_baker_cow.html
That is the last from me on the topic.

[z3r0_d]

well thats two. But now the question is, can python even do this ? and how would it ? I know there is no render command tools for python, the cel shader script was being hyped as a texture baker in some sort of way since it was rendering the mesh on the screen some how.

I dou’t realy know anything further until python can call renders, so I guess it is a python thing. On to .org site hope that might catch someone.

python can’t trigger a render still?!

http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/233PythonDoc/Render-module.html

hah!

… well anyway, a texture baker isn’t entirely trivial, it depends how picky you want to be

for example, the lightwave one didn’t appear to extend the edges past the uv faces so using that as a texture would make the seams highly visible.

[youngbatcat]

python can’t trigger a render still?!

http://www.blender.org/modules/documentation/233PythonDoc/Render-module.html

hah!

… well anyway, a texture baker isn’t entirely trivial, it depends how picky you want to be

for example, the lightwave one didn’t appear to extend the edges past the uv faces so using that as a texture would make the seams highly visible.

How new is that ? It is news to me, so this is a good thing. And with the LSCM(?) a simple test texture bake should be easy enough to pull off. Of course better UV unwrapping would be the best method for less seams.

No when you just apply a texture on a mesh you have the coordinates of sphere cube plane and UV. the sphere cube and plane are these the same as the UV unwrap menu lists? I would just use LSCM for the most part though.

Getting closer