Aki Shichiroji

Ok... so i've been battling with a decent lighting set up for some av related stuff lately and have been having some major issues getting light to render consistently from body part to body part at the seams (IE: between head and torso or torso and legs).

Sobriquet suggested I try the CCC meshes, which I've done, but a seam always shows up for some reason.

Is it my lighting setup? is it the fact that there are multiple unmerged verts? is it the fact that surround verts aren't always perpendicular to the seams?

I am using Blender, with Oren-Nayer and Blinn shaders (as i want the end result to be more matte than shiny) if it makes a difference.

Vaelissa Cortes

I tend to focus on objects and scenes instead of things that would require the use of an avatar mesh, so it's not something I have much experience with, but I can try to help.

First off though, I'll link this. It seems like it may be helpful to you, if you have not already had a look.

SL Forums

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Miriel Enfield

I've not had this problem, but my experience with baking the av mesh has been limited. Subtle seams aren't really a huge issue when you're just baking some fuzzy shadows. However, I'm guessing that...

It's this. Blender won't smooth the shading between two faces that aren't connected (or if it does, I haven't found that feature yet), so you may get seams. Try merging the vertices and seeing what happens.

Aki Shichiroji

Thanks for the link, Vaelissa

I am working with some pre-existing skin textures that are seamless prior to bake... and I did eventually find that the key was making sure AO was *off* and all other shader and material settings were consistent from head to torso to legs.

Now i'm pretty much just trying to fix a whole lot of odd shadowing based on my lighting setup.

I'm using a ring of 12 lamps all equidistant from the mesh, slightly above the head. all with specular lighting off, all with diffuse lighting on. One adjustment here means odd shadows elsewhere... i'm almost considering the use of lots of smaller, low range diffuse lights closer to the mesh, but am concerned this might blow out the highlights too much :/

Aki Shichiroji

Here's the thing though - once you join the body parts together, Blender will bake all three materials as one - IE: it will overlap one over the other.

Miriel Enfield

12 lamps seems a little excessive. Have you looked into Blender's other lighting options? Ambient light does funny things sometimes, but there are other light sources designed to provide a lot of uniform illumination.

Could you mess around with the UV maps? Make the image 512 x 1536, shrink each map vertically accordingly, place each map, then join the objects and merge the vertices. Might be too much work for something that can be fixed in an image editor, though.

Aki Shichiroji

12 lights in a ring around, plus one diffuse overhead has gotten me closest so far. I gave this a try after reading some suggestions on the SL Forums. I should mention that the ring is pretty far out and they're all set to falloff inversely related to the distance. This has maintained the brightness, but at the cost of flattening the skin out a bit

Miriel Enfield

Have you tried using the hemi lamp type? It's designed to provide overall brightness. I'm not sure it'll do anything about your seam issue, mind, but using a few hemi lights would save Blender the trouble of rendering 12 different lamps.

Ambient light would also work, but my experience is that it never looks very good when baking.

Aki Shichiroji

i did, a few nights back... and i think i tried something else mostly because the shadows being cast were really harsh and black. i'm kinda futzing around in the world colour settings right now... seeing if i can come up with a better solution. Maybe I *can* get it to work?

whyroc

I know what you mean, there are a few things to try.. up the margin in the bake settings, this should put a thin line of color outside the uv edges that can help blend seams.

Are you using domino's avatar mesh blend file? Its optimized and you can adjust the shapes (for baggy jeans example).

You should try using a dome light .. Dome Light Setup | geneome

Another tip would be to get the latest daily build from the trunk at graphicall.org The Texture painting features have been vastly improved, now supports painting across the seams.

-whyroc

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Raindrop Drinkwater

Bummer, I don't know how to explain it, but you can make it so you have three different UVmap layers. That's the way I do it (I also made my own UVmap, one for the body, one for the head, roughly based on the Poser4 layout)

For each part, I selected the other parts of the layout and shrunk them and put them in the "holes" of the layout.

For example: For the UV map of my top, I kept the top part intact, and shrunk the body, the head, and the superfluous arm. I then shoved the small extra parts where I could on the layout.

... look at the pic, it probably makes more sense than what I just tried to explain.

Attached Images

blender_uvmaps.jpg (212.3 KB, 140 views)

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Raindrop Drinkwater

You can design your outfit on one UVmap and bake it on another one. So what I usually do is that I work on my custom full body layout, and bake the final texture onto the linden layouts. It allows me to paint details or apply patterned textures on a shape that actually makes some sort of sense.

I just wish I had found this technique earlier And that I could explain it better. o.O

Attached Images

blender_uvmaps02.jpg (216.7 KB, 137 views)

Rev Eponym

I'd appreciate it if you attempted to explain it. I might be able to help work it out, so that everyone can benefit.

.

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Raindrop Drinkwater

I'll do my best. I'm just back from my granny and I have a headache, so I won't be coherent at all now, but maybe later.

ETA:
I found an interesting page on Blender.org:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Do...ing_the_Layout

It mentions multiple UV layouts, and is an interesting read.

Raindrop Drinkwater

I've had a serious look into how to write this tutorial. I'm going to need a bit of time for it, so in the meantime, I'm going to point you to the tutorials that made me "click":
SL Forums
combined with
Texturizing sculpties with multiple images « machinimatrix

I basically applied the principles of tutorial n°2 to the avatar. I can't remember exactly how I managed to keep all the layouts with one joined object, so that's what I'm going to focus on in the next couple of days.

/me does things she can't understand.

whyroc

The file that Domino references in that one is a little borked from what I remember, just wanted to give the link to the updated avatar file.. the 'key' to this one is look at the shape keys to choose from a bunch of preset body types.

http://www.dominodesigns.info/downlo...r/avatar.blend

As for the seamless bake I'm going to go have another go with the avatar file and the UV mapping / layering principles, y'all have got my interest with this

Chip Midnight

The problem is most likely smoothing if you haven't gone through and welded the overlapping verts at the seams and smoothed them. I'm not a Blender user so I don't know the procedures for that partcular app. If a rendering engine rendered the mesh as it would look in the real world it would appear faceted like a cut stone. That's due to the fact that it's made of all those little triangular flat surfaces. In order to make 3d meshes look more complex than they actually are smoothing is applied over adjacent triangles based on a threshold value of how close they are to being coplanar or not. This shades the adjacent polygons with a smooth gradient instead of with a distinct edge. At a seam where the adjacent faces don't actually share an edge, that smoothing can't be applied.

The overlapping UV space of each of the three texture areas is also an issue because the head, upper body, and lower body all utilize the same square UV space. In order to get around that issue it's a good idea to remap the avatar so that those three sections are stacked in a long vertical strip so that the head, upper body, and lower body all exist in one UV space without overlapping. Then you can bake the whole body in one go. I don't know if anyone who's done that has released it to the community. I've never released mine.