Generating a diffuse after assigning materials in Blender?

[Izzy Stipe]

I finally finished modeling the home. I've already UV unwrapped all models and assigned a material for each object and face. But now I've hit a wall.

I want to generate a diffuse texture for each material the same way it looks in Blender (Cycles), which I can later apply to the models in SL, is this possible?

These are the only steps I made to get each material looking the way they do in the screenshot below.

 

1. UV unwrapped using Smart UV Project
2. Assigned a material to faces
3. Selected Image Texture under Color options and uploaded a repeating diffuse texture
4. Scaled the texture to where I saw fit

What steps do I need to take to generate the textures as they look in Blender? I know I could just add the regular repeating textures in SL, but I also want to bake in the AO.

 



[arton Rotaru]

You need non overlapping UVs, which fit into the 0 to 1 UV space to bake AO. With the 1024 x 1024 texture size limit in SL the resolution will be rather low on larger surfaces. So tiling textures are much more preferable. They will be higher res even with smaller texture sizes than a non tiling 1024.

It can work on walls if the texture would tile only horizontally for example.

What some people do is baking the AO on extra planes, and having them hovering slightly above the original geometry with the tiling texture. Instead of using a plane which covers the entire geo, I would recommend to use just strips of polygons in the corners, to avoid unnecessary overdraw.

[Izzy Stipe]

I didn't think about that. It does make it easier, and after reviewing some of the mesh houses I noticed on some mesh homes there's an extra layer for AO above the faces. Now I just gotta figure out how to bake a transparent AO layer. Thanks.

[arton Rotaru]

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Izzy Stipe wrote:

 Now I just gotta figure out how to bake a transparent AO layer.

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Inverting the AO map, using this as the alpha channel, of a solid black image, and adjusting the transparency in-world might do the trick.

[Izzy Stipe]

Sorry to bother you all again...

I've succesfully created a layer for the AO map and applied it to SL... but did not expect the alpha sorting bug.

Video:

http://webmshare.com/3rR08

 

The video shows the AO layer at 50%, and the same bug occurs at 0% transparency. All four AO walls share the same material shown below.



 

I noticed other mesh houses are able to pull it off without the bug, specifically the Skye Forest Cabin. I have no idea how though.

Anyone know a workaround for this?

[Izzy Stipe]

So oddly enough linking the two objects fixed the problem. Even when I unlinked them the problem didn't occur again. Not sure what even caused it in the first place.

[arton Rotaru]

This does look more like Z-Fighting rather than alpha sorting. lifting the planes a little more from the underlaying geometry should fix this.