Take terribly unwrapped model and transfer textures from model to good unwrapped ?

So model A = Terrible unwrap but textured ok

Model B = perfect unwrap of the same model

can I just put one on the other and Do bake textures from model A-> model B?

Ok, it is possible but the normals are not as “deep”…

hrm.

edit:
Never mind, for some reason reflection maps make bump maps look “Deeper”

So I unwrap - texture with pre made maps, then copy, unwrap for efficiency/not overlapping, then bake old model to new model.

Yes, just bake selected to active, make sure you bake all the textures separately, it’s a good way to reuse old models, making them more efficient and simple but retaining their original details.

You can use projection painting as explained in this tutorial video. It is 2.4x. I guess there are others out there with newer versions of Blender.

Thanks for that link Monster, i usually use two UV layers and bake from a concept map to a final UV, but that requires some post processing to get rid of ugly seams, and they don’t always line up. This technique would give a much nicer result.

I’ll give it a go.

Yar, however my character was textured already using non-traditional (overlapping uv’s)

just “Baking it across” was pretty slick.

However monsters technique looks like it would work amazing for things I had concept art for, however most of the time I just “play” and if it ends up high enough quality I post it.

It would be cool to be able to use a “Clone tool” and multiple uv images … like the gimp clone tool… and just be able to texture paint like that.

I think you can do that too. The tools are a little difficult to understand, but i think they can do anything you want if you can find out how.

Depending on how the final result should look, overlapping UVs are pretty common in game models (if you have texture details that can repeat in multiple places on the model, overlapping UVs can save you a lot of texture space). That said though, why not just unwrap the model the best way before you start creating the texture? Any time you bake a texture across you’ll lose some detail (in a lot of ways it’s like scaling an image down and then back up).

@BluePrintRandom, I see why you commented over on my thread. It seems we’ve both had the same problem and arrived at the same conclusion. For me it was the terrible auto-generated anti-UV map from 3D reconstruction that I wanted to clean up to a sane texture layout.

My settings (for those who want some details in 2.72b) were:
Cycles bake, no lamps, environment colour white strength 1.0.
New ‘clean’ model closely built over messy auto-generated model.
New model duplicated and scaled to encompass messy model to act as cage (appears to help with baking).
In render settings, bake combined map using Cage and Selected to Active into diffuse texture.
Changed texture and option to normal and baked normal texture.

There are a few other caveats, but other people have documented it: http://blender.stackexchange.com/questions/13508/how-do-i-bake-a-texture-using-cycles-bake