question about Baked surface

[Malo]

Hello,

 

Is there a way to baked surface for a selection and not on the whole object?

[robcat2075]

Hmmm... i presume hiding the unwanted portion does not get you that, right?

[robcat2075]

I don't think there is a way to just bake part of a model.

 

 

Here are some work-around ideas...

 

- If the selection is a self-contained portion of the model, not connected to any other part... cut and paste it into another model window. Bake it there, then copy and paste it back into the original model.

 

-If you don't mind having some wasted bitmap space... bake the whole model like this...

 

 

 

 

 

and then remove the baked images from from parts of the model by detaching and reattaching CPs that are adjacent to patches you don't want baked.

 

Detaching and reattaching one CP cleared four patches...

 

 

 

 

-An alternative to the above... it might be possible to remove the decal assignments to certain patches by text editing the MDL file rather than manually disabling the patches. I have not investigated that.

 

 

-Crazy idea... the surface maps are all baked as 24-bit maps. In a paint program you could add an alpha channel to those and paint black on that anywhere you don't want the baked surface to show.

If you hold down the SHIFT key when you choose "Bake Surface" you can set "Margins" to some large value like 10 so you don't have to be pixel accurate in the areas where wanted and unwanted patches adjoin

 

 

I baked the surface, then in PS I temporarily wrote a number on each tile and swapped that new version with the original in A:M so i could see how patches fit to the model...

 

 

After looking at that I figured that if I wanted to remove the baking from the middle patches, I needed to hide 8,9, and 13-18. I painted black on the alpha channel under those tiles....

 

 

 

... then saved and swapped again.

 

Here is the model with the edited baked surface on it. I added a new Checker Material on the whole model. It shows that the baked surface is no longer visible on the middle patches.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Rodney]

I think Robert is on to something there.

 

Because A:M is baking surfaces a similar approach would be to make a Group for any part of the mesh you don't want to have baked and turn on the transparency for the Surface property.

That make everything you don't want baked (what is in that group) white. The baked color image could then be used as a transparency map to even get rid of that white from itself.

(I'm investigating to see if there is some way to get that white to be a different color)

 

I would think we'd be able to flip the normals and get a similar result but that's not what I'm seeing on my end.

[robcat2075]

I think Robert is on to something there.

 

Because A:M is baking surfaces a similar approach would be to make a Group for any part of the mesh you don't want to have baked and turn on the transparency for the Surface property.

That make everything you don't want baked (what is in that group) white. The baked color image could then be used as a transparency map to even get rid of that white from itself

You could paste that result into the alpha channel that I discuss above. This would save having to number the patches to identify them.

[Malo]

Hello and thank you very much for your informations!
I did not know the trick for the SHIFT key (thank you)
My intention was to use different maps to have a bigger definition in the details and to save the surface to paint so as not to overload the weight of the images.

The only solution I found was to isolate a part of the model by erasing everything else. Bake and export. Copy the UV in the XML file export and paste this UV into the XML file of the complete model.
But it's a lot of manipulation