What is this process called that makes a texture from a sculpt?

I recall seeing a video once but i can’t remember where it was from…
but what they did was create a mesh shirt, and then duplicate it to save the original. Then on the duplicate one they sculpted it so it would have visible looking seams and wrinkles in the cloth where they would need to be.

Then i think he put a lamp on near the shirt and had blender create some sort of texture of the wrinkles and what not of the shirt that he would apply to the original mesh so that he would have a low poly shirt that looked far more realistic.
I’ve heard of the terms Normal map, bump map, and specular map, but i really don’t think i have a great grasp on them. All i really know how to do is to turn on the normal settings in the textures menu and that the bright areas of the texture are suppose to be lifted or pushed in in the geometry…
anyway i’m confused…

But i’ve sculpted a shirt and pants and wondered if i could do that same thing. Otherwise i would just have to attempt retopology but i’m not sure how visible the wrinkles may be if i did that.

Any suggestions? ^-^

Thank you (:

if he’s using lamps on the model i suspect he was baking out some fake ambient occlusion,or lights so that he could fake the deep shadows that you get in creases. simply use the bake options and select the AO option or the lighting option and bake tob the uv the same way you would with a normal map/spec map etc. you may have to experiment a little to get the right look.

Thank you (:

I think… i may have done it, i got it to create something to the UV map that i saved as an image to apply as a texture. It does have some wrinkles on it but i’m a bit disappointed at how the wrinkles aren’t as prominent in a texture form so may have to try again and make them a bit more than i think they should be.

if it is sculpted ok with plenty of detail then it should bake ok. how are you sculpting? multires or dynatopo? and what bake settings are you using? you may simply have to move the distance and bias settings to get a good bake

What you are referring to is called Texture Baking. A Bump and Normal Map are doing very similar things. They are differing in what they are capable of. Basically you are creating a Height Map which is faking surface detail by using color information to define “peaks” and “valleys”. Bump Maps are limited to 256 shades of grey (also called 8bit greyscale). Normal maps use 3 colors, one for each axis, to better define the point’s location in space. there is a lot more information to read on wiki.blender.org or wikipedia :wink:

For some basic texture baking workflow watch the following video:

I was using Multi res for the clothes. i had it up to a sculpt 3 so perhaps i could have gone in and added a bit more perhaps.

the settings i had… i can be honest in saying i was messing with them all over before making this thread, for the AO map that worked it says i have Bake from Multi res, Normalized, and bake to vertex turned off. (Bake from multi res couldn’t seem to recognise i made it from a multi res.)

Selected to active turned on, Clear turned on, The split was Automatic, Margin:2 Bias of 0.001, and the distance was just 0.

on your multi res make sure the preview is set to 1 then you should be able to just bake from multires to your base mesh UVs. as long as there is an image there to bake to of course. bot then yes it does occasionally glitch out and refuses to recognise the multires. try hiding your other modifiers that may be on (thickness, mirror etc, and try again) some bake methods dont need the multires to work, lke AO and texture bake
it may be time to share your blend