Texture baking? Please help!

Is there anyway that you can actually bake the shadows directly onto a texture? My horse model is already textured (imported from Sketchup) and is texture, but not uv mapped. I exported as and .ASE file from sketchup and it saves the texture coordinates so in blender I just have to click the mesh and open the texture… I don’t know if that’s UV mapping or not lol…

Anyway how can I texture bake directly onto the texture? Everytime I do it, it wipes the texture off the model and replaces it with the shadows… And then I have to edit it in Gimp… And usually that isn’t a problem if it’s a simple texture… But this is a complex texture and it’ll take too long.

Any suggestions? Thanks!

-Alex

If you are looking to bake any thing, you must have UV map and image to bake on to. Also did you pick “Full Render” button for Baking? Any way there is good tutorial.

Can you do this with AO baking?