Question.. Does lighting affect the baking of a Cycles Diffuse Material?

[Deygus]

So i'll be honest, I suck at baking stuff in blender. It just frustrates the hell out of me but I am convinced I am probably doing something wrong more than likely.

I made a House and I textured it with Cycles Nodes but I then tried baking out a Diffuse Map and I noticed that the texture looked like dog crap and very dark compared to the actual textures that I created in Krita.

I followed this tutorial https://youtu.be/Aq2tUT0iyCQ to learn how to bake out a diffuse map from my combined textures on my model..

Any ideas?

[Pte Jack]

I don't think light affects the bake if you're just baking Color.

But if Direct and/or Indirect are selected in the bake panel, then yes, light affects the diffuse bake.

[Deygus]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

I don't think light affects the bake if you're just baking Color.

But if Direct and/or Indirect are selected in the bake panel, then yes, light affects the diffuse bake.

Okay thanks, that's what I thought but I wasn't too sure since I didn't select anything but thought it was just strange that the texture turned out way really dark. Probably means either my texture is too low or maybe my building is too complex I guess. But the wierd part is it looks really good in cycles when rendered so I have no idea what's up with it...

[The Renderer]

It might be a color management issue. If you want to use the texture in a different program/game than Blender and find it to be too dark, adjust it with a 2.2 gamma value in e.g. Krita. If you just use it in Blender you can ignore this (as you found out yourself... looks good in Cycles as you said).

[Pte Jack]

All 3 buttons are on in bake. If you just want color (which would be equivalent to Base Color in Substance Painter (SP) or 3D-Coat) you have to check the other 2 off. It may be a multiply problem in Blender if you throw the 3 at the same texture bake, multiply may not be being applied correctly to the Direct and indirect lighting and the colors come out weird in the bake. (Don't really know as when it comes to textures, I use SP or 3D-Coat to create my final set and pull color only textures baked from Blender to base them on.)

[Deygus]

Originally posted by The Renderer:

It might be a color management issue. If you want to use the texture in a different program/game than Blender and find it to be too dark, adjust it with a 2.2 gamma value in e.g. Krita. If you just use it in Blender you can ignore this (as you found out yourself... looks good in Cycles as you said).

I was trying to use it in UE4 but it still looked pretty dark and crappy. I was attempting to pretty much bake out a nice texture map for my house model. I thought it might be more efficient but it seems I may have to go about assigning the textures manually via the uv map.

And hmm... the color management might be related maybe. I do have Filmic installed but I didn't switch it over and thought it would be fine on the defaults. That's a good point.. I am gonna go look.

[Deygus]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

All 3 buttons are on in bake. If you just want color (which would be equivalent to Base Color in Substance Painter (SP) or 3D-Coat) you have to check the other 2 off. It may be a multiply problem in Blender if you throw the 3 at the same texture bake, multiply may not be being applied correctly to the Direct and indirect lighting and the colors come out weird in the bake. (Don't really know as when it comes to textures, I use SP or 3D-Coat to create my final set and pull color only textures baked from Blender to base them on.)

Yeah, I definitely wanna get SP soon, just not in my budget right now, not sure if the demo in my account is active anymore either. I think I may have used it, i dont recall but its definitely on my get list for sure. I have Armor Paint that can create PBR Mats that I can export to UE4 that has a similar node-based system like blender but its in Alpha and i havent really figured out how to use it very well. I definitely wanna get 3d coat as well. Tried a demo of it once before and found it was fantastic to use but I'm mostly trying to stick to using Blender for Modeling/Sculpting.

I don't think i had them selected, I left the defaults.

The texture is 2048 and so are the original. I wonder if making a better uv map might help? I just did the standard smart uv unwrap because I wanted to test it out to see if there'd be any difference. I'll try setting color selected to see what happens.

[Pte Jack]

This is the situation you're running into with your bake...

https://i.imgur.com/sqTVuqv.png

[Deygus]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

This is the situation you're running into with your bake...

https://i.imgur.com/sqTVuqv.png

Ahhh oops, guess I had it backwards and tutorial never said anything about that but its a bit older. Thanks!

[Deygus]

Originally posted by Pte Jack:

This is the situation you're running into with your bake...

https://i.imgur.com/sqTVuqv.png

Hell yeah!! Just tried it out, that fixed it! Thanks so much!! :D

The textures are bright now as I was seeking so that's the most important part!

The roof, wood, and siding textures turned out slightly different but I think I can probably fix that maybe with improved uv maps and a higher sample would fix it or worst case scenario i'll just use plain colors, still doesnt look too bad either way, and is the step in the direction that I needed, I appreciate the help!

[Pte Jack]

yeah. you're picture of the textures confirmed my suspicions. These are just my primary base colors now for when I take the model into SP for final painting. That is where I'll rough it up with wear and tear, decals, warning labels, etc...) but it still looks good in Blender as is. LOL