It’s now obvious to me after 3 hours of struggling with blender unexplained black magic that baking is an awesome feature thought with the ass
i won’t waste time detailing my particular case nor posting my blend will instead ask just one clear and simple question:
How can i make and setup an image target for AO baking ?
This question seems dumb but the guru behind blender seems to have random behaviour on this subject.
When hitting F12 the renderer don’t bug the user for an imaginary render target that could not might maybe be present or absent or maybe might not be set up as a target or maybe…
it just renders the scene and BASTA !
WHY THE HELL isn’t it the same for baking ??? why ??? because it’s too simple ? too obvious ? too user-friendly ?
IMHO instead of hand-jobing on the shape of the interface buttons this kind of feature among lots of others should be deeply redesigned so that it can just be used. But well i agree it’s another discussion that most don’t like to have…
so…
I already got an object wich is already unwrapped.
So i make a very new UVmap in wich i unwrap my mesh.
i create a texture same options as in your video
hit the bake button same options as in the video
the newly created image in UV editor disappears and then pops the msg no object or images to render to.
No matter whether am in edit or object mode. I always got the same behaviour
Ah yes, of course it works with suzanne like in the video, and it also works even if suzanne already got another UV layer.
AAAAAAAAALRIGHT !!! i think it’s all my bad and finally all works like for Suzanne ! It was just a renderability problem in the outliner window. I wonder why this little render flag got OFF as i never use this window ( neither in never render my scenes in blender ).
Anyway the all purpose error saying there’s no image found to bake to is quite confuring and therefore useless. At least as much as would be a simple message saying ‘error’. For the next times i’ll have to care about this window i never use.
Now that AO bake works i noticed the bake is very noisy !!!
The rendering of occlusion lacks samples. Therefore to have perfect noiseless AO you just have to go in the WORLD tab, and get in the ‘gather’ section. Even this section is greyed in my case, here you can choose the gather method: approx or raytrace. raytrace seems to give better results but is still noisy. then you can raise the sampling up to 32. 16 gives a fair result and 32 is close to perfect but takes a damn bunch of time to render…
Yes always. Also mind what keys you hit. Object mode Ctrl-H and Ctrl-Alt-H = Restrict Render on and off for selected objects. There’s also a Specials menu item “Clear All Restrict Render” (Key W in object mode) for quick set to render all objects. Btw these features/shortcuts are missing from 3Dview Object menu.
Blender is a beast. Embrace the beast to tame the beast.
ahah yes i agree Larry ! But sometimes the beast bites and i feel like kicking her butt
Nevertheless thanks for the shortcuts ! i didn’t know about them, and as am sure that i never changed the renderability of my object in the outliner, am also quite sure i pushed CTRL+H or CTRL+ALT+H by error.
