What is that process where you turn a sculpt into a texture?

Hello, So im trying to finally kick myself into learning how to make clothes with real textures as apposed to coloring it with materials and changing the topology just to make 8-bit like color changes… If that makes sense at all.

Anyway, i remember from a long time ago, i heard of this method where you take a sculpted object, set up some lights, and have it create the shadows as a texture onto a lower poly version of the object.

That’s really all i remember on the subject. What is that procedure called? And is that still a good method to learn for texturing clothes?

Thanks

There’s not much to say about it… the camera shoud be set to orthogonal, the light should be only the AO, than render the diffuse color, normals, AO, and any other info you need (check the render passes to select which info you want), and don’t forget to save the depth (if you need a displace texture) with something higher than 8bits.

Are you suggesting that i take like, screenshots of those kind of renders? or…

Sorry that i’m confused. it sounds like you may be talking about Cycles and sadly i’m still one of those people who still use Blender Internal T-T

HERE IS TUTORIAL EXACTLY ABOUT THIS.

What you’re describing sounds like a mix between “texture baking” - where you record all of the complex lighting and reflections in a scene into a simple image texture so that it can be rapidly rendered (Blender Guru has a decent video explaining it here: https://www.blenderguru.com/tutorials/introduction-baking-cycles/ ) - and “normal baking” where you have a high poly mesh and a low poly mesh, and generate the normal map you’d need to make your low poly mesh look like the high poly mesh. There was a good tutorial on this somewhere, I suspect it was an old CG Cookie article and went into the memory hole in their recent site redesign.

As I recall it’s a real pain in the bum to get right, because all the settings are extremely counterintuitive and the error messages are extremely unhelpful, but the functionality is there. The key thing to remember is to set up a new image, have the image in an image texture node in the material (it doesn’t need to be connected to anything, but it does need to be selected), and then use the “bake” tab at the bottom of the render panel. Oh, and remember to save the image as soon as it’s done, because Blender has a bad habit of dumping unsaved texture images more or less at random. Good luck.

HERE IS TUTORIAL

Thank you so much for the help everyone :smiley:
I got it working and this is so nice and helpful!

It just took me forever because of my dreaded fear of UV Unwraping and Sculpting.

The sculpting was certainly difficult because i was using Dynamic Sculpting and for whatever reason that function liked to crash alot.
And also i found myself feeling like i couldnt get detail refined enough for what i was looking for. I wonder if having a dual monitor set up increases the pixel ration of your screen for how blender reads it. even at 100 Pixel density, i wasnt getting very much detail change… I suspected it to be my 2nd monitor being active (For a reference image on clothing folds)

But anyway i’m just really bad at sculpting…

But i got what i needed done!
Thank you so much :smiley: