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FSX Texture Baking in Max 2011?

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Hi guys, this is a continuation of my earlier "Max 2011 any use?" thread. With thanks again for the tips voiced there and then.

So, have finally taken the plunge, got Max 2011, got the 32-bit version installed and running, and got some means of data exchange gmax <-> Max going, i.e., create something in gmax, compile a mdl, let Arno's ModelConverter create a .3ds, load that into Max, do something there, save that as .3ds, import that back into gmax. This seems to work, theoretically, at least, with some considerable loss of information (smoothing, texture settings etc) along the way.

See the wheel that I have loaded into Max along this route. What I am interested in is the Render to Texture feature in Max aka texture baking. The wheel is fairly detailed, with rims and spokes and hub segments etc. all modelled in 3d, so my hope is to generate some shadows and highlights to make it look less flat, and bake a ready-to-use texture from it. So I have positioned some lights and set up the Render to Texture window, and right enough I get a Targa file with the rendered wheel in the right place. Except, as you can see, the rendering is much inferior to what one can see in the Left window. That shouldn't be the case should it? I mean I'd be better off with a screenshot of the Left window, wouldn't I?

I am using the standard scanline renderer for the time being, but using the "mental ray" option doesn't seem to produce any better result.

Any ideas of what can be tweaked or corrected here? FYI, I have copied the whole of the Render Window settings.

And are there any good texture baking tutorials that you could recommend?


rt00.jpg


rt_02.jpg
 
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I can't see in the render options what resolution you're rendering to. 2048x2048 would give better results than 128x128, methinks.
 
UTube is a great spot to look for tutorials on baking textures , Re resolution i like to assign as many pixels as it uses on screen in game, for a wheel 256 X 256 is about ideal.

The main ingredient in many of the Baked textures is an addon program for Max .etc called VRay, it's what adds dirt layers and AO with a warm feel that buyers are expecting to see in the VC these days.

There are about 300 settings and checkboxes , in addition an entire library of materials for its rendering engine to play with that are beyond our needs in FS but make impressive ball bearings if you are into detail.

It’s an amazing tool capable of minute adjustments that can produce transparent shadow and occlusion layers for paint kits and generally make painting an aircraft a breeze , a worthy expenditure of time to learn as it saves time down the road , you apply a max material , a layer of crud in the corners if you want , some rust or dust if preferred and render to texture with a hard copy , shaded and ready to process in Photoshop as a dds , it blows me away every time i use it .
 
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Thanks Chuck, will try Vray as soon as I have come to grips with the essentials.

At this point I am just puzzled by the fact that the render to texture window shows something entirely different from the relevant View (Left), which renders just fine. Is that what you texture baking guys get, too?

Hairyspin, the resolution is set at 2048 (see below), the size of the original texture. The wheel itself is around 250,250 pixels, which should be ample for plenty of shaded detail ...

rt_03.jpg
 
The render results you got should match the layout you see in your uvw mapping , if a planar map was all there was then that’s what will render , if a uvw unwrap is in use with the treads and other features laid out separately , rubber , metal etc then everything that is part of the object will be rendered where they are on your mapping.

Once done the render is saved as a TGA so as to have a transparent background, paste the render into your master texture and adjust the uvw map to match its location, if its rendered to scale ( or auto unwrapped ) you save time renderning and get to see if the resolution is ok and crisp enough for the job , scrunching a massive 2048 down to a fraction of that won't improve the results at all.

One trick you will find handy is to remember that one object is rendered at a time, no matter its size or complexity , so if all the parts on one bitmap are attached together the totality of the textures contents are rendered in one pass , so i create a separate baking model that has every part on the sheet i wish rendered to texture attached together.
IE i like to have one sheet with all the horizontal surfaces ( wings flaps stabilizers elevator ) and create a part with all those elements attached together and mapped on one 2048 X 2048.
Same idea for the fuse and vertical stabilizers , all the parts are attached together and rendered to texture, only the main painted elements need to be part of the bake model , just what gets painted and repainted , because the result is a transparency you can paste it as a layer and all the elements that are not being rendered are not covered and allow blending in Photoshop.
 
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OK thanks, points noted. I get the Targa file, will experiment some more using different parts, lights, renderers. Are there any FSX-tested light profiles out there by any chance?
 
Thanks for that Chuck, useful to know when I eventually get my mitts on Max. :)
 
The Omni light is the one i use the most , and only one thing to know before you experiment , each kind light has a shadow checkbox in the parameters list, with it on the render shadows depending on position of the light source and objects between it and the render object, how diffuse the edge of the shadow line is can be tweaked in the parameters list as well.
 
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Aha! It seems the reason for the differences in my View and Render windows were due to my UVW mapping both sides at once. At any rate remapping more carefully did the trick.
 
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