Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
6. Let's open Gimp and create a new image 512 x 512 pixels in size. It doesn't mater
what background color the image has; let's save it as
bake-skymap.tga
in the
tex
folder, within the project's folder, and click on
Save
in the
Save as TGA
dialog. Let's
close the image, but keep Gimp open.
7. Back in Blender, let's split the 3D View. Drag the botom-let corner by moving the
pointer. In the lower window that appears, let's open a UV/Image Editor then go to
Image → Open
and load the
bake-skymap.tga
image.
8. Now go to the 3D View, switch to Edit Mode for the skydome, select all the verices,
and go to
Mesh → UV Unwrap... → Unwrap
to get a nice UV map of the mesh of
the skydome shaped like a spiderweb.
9. Then go to the UV/Image Editor, select all the verices of the UV map (
Select →
Select or Deselect All
) and scale them down to give just a bit of space from the
borders of the image.
10. Then let's deselect the outer ring of verices of the UV map by hiing the
C
key
and then "drawing" with the middle mouse buton over the verices that must be
deselected. Having deselected the outer verices, we only need to scale the selected
ones up unil the outer ring of faces becomes thin (not too thin, though); we do this
only to get more pixels of the image being used for the really important part of the
bake.
11. Let's also set the name of the UV Layout by going to the
Object Data
tab in the
Properies Editor, locaing the
UV Texture
panel, and then changing the name
from
UVTex
to
skymap
.
12. To p e r fo r m t h e b a ke , w e m u s t g To t To t h e
Render
tab in the Properies Editor, scroll
down to the
Bake
panel, make sure the
Bake Mode
is set to
Full Render
, and then
click on the
Bake
buton. Now we should see the
bake-skymap.tga
image being
filled with the image of the skymap, shaped according to the UV map we created.
13. We can take a look at the bake applied on the skydome by going to the
Display
panel in the
Properties
sidebar of the 3D View, seing the
Shading
method to
Texture Face
or
Multitexture
, and then seing
Viewport Shading
to
Textured
(drop-down menu to the right of the
Object Mode
menu).
14. Let's also perform a final change in the skydome mesh: Switch to
Edit Mode
, select
all the verices (the
A
key, once or twice), and then go to
Mesh → Faces → Flip
Normals
.
The image
bake-skymap.tga
stored in the hard disk hasn't been changed,
the bake is now being handled by Blender in memory (noice the asterisk in the
Image
menu of the
UV/Image Editor
).
Since the result of the bake is the one we wanted, let's save it over the original
image.
