Texture Baking Objects

[Baddcog]

All right,

 

Since Texture baking is the way to go these days, and I am way behind the curve (wish I'd learned this stuff sooner) I figured a thread was in order.

 

Most programs do this in pretty much the same manner and have same options. Basically for anyone who doesn't know what texture baking is, it is simply rendering the object/scene to get Normal maps, Diffuse maps, Ambient Occlusion Maps and baking them onto an object.

 

This isn't a tut so I'll stop there and get on with a question I have:

 

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3dsMax7

 

Working on my ground cover (leaves/ivy/whatever).

 

First I just made a high poly leaf, cloned it a bunch to make a carpet. Exported that and a flat plane and baked some AO and normal maps from that.

Then I added a basic green layer and multiplied it onto my AO map and got a decent, but nothing special texure for decals.

 

Now I want to take it one step further. That map was just 'plain', all leaves looked alike. With hundred of leafs painting details onto them isn't an option (veins, holes, whatnot).

 

So I have UV mapped a single leaf, baked it out for ao, painted in some details. So this one leaf now looks better and more unique. I plan on doing maybe 2-3 leafs (a bit of work). Then cloning them all and scattering them. Thus giving the patch of 100 leaves several variations, that with normal maps and in game lighting should look pretty good.

 

But I have barely touched render to texture so I think I'm missing a step. Don't know if anyone here knows Max well enough to help either.

 

Basically I want to bake those 100 leaves, with existing 3 textures into one texture map. (I can do it by rendering the object, then using that render as the diffuse so I'm sure it can be done through the render-tex dialog.)

It would allow for more precise alignment to do it all as one step, rather than trying to overlay the render perfectly to the output normal map.

 

Anyone have any idea?

[Nosslak]

I haven't used Max but shouldn't it be possible to just make a plane over it, unwrap it and then bake to it? That's how you do it in Blender and I thought that how you did it in every other program too. If you want I can import it into Blender and bake it from there.

[Baddcog]

That's what I'm basically doing, but was baking a bunch of non-textured leaves to a plane.

 

Now I want to bake a bunch of textures leaves (3 diffuse maps) to one diffuse map on the plane. I just need to find the settings, I'm sure it can be done, but can't find any tuts that cover that part of baking.

 

I can't pass it off for someone else to do because I need to learn it and because I'm testing so I don't have a finished object. But thanks.