Graphics Programs Reference
In-Depth Information
Layer: bake
F
Influence panel:
Color: Enabled
Blend: Add
That's it for the shading part, now we can take a few minutes to navigate our completed
scene and look at the nice texturing, including the very beauiful, seamless skydome. Don't
forget to save the file.
Objective Complete - Mini Debriefing
This ime we worked on the main object of the scene, applying the very same technique as in
the previous task of the project. The only new things we found were the added complexity of
the UV Layout, the (very likely) situaion of having a distorted UV layout island that needed
some work to correct it, and having to work with more than one material for a single object.
Classified Intel
Given the number of imes that we applied the very same technique in these tasks of the
project, it's very likely that you can just close your eyes and repeat the steps from memory
without a single mistake. This is typical in cases where the final "deployment medium"
isn't the "naive" one for the tool that we work with. Let's further explain it to avoid any
confusion: The Blender Game Engine is ightly coupled with Blender as a whole, even though
there are features of Blender that can't be used in the BGE. That said, the overall point is
that the rendering of the scenes, when in the context of a game, is performed by a graphics
card, thus becoming a "non-naive deployment medium" from the 3D authoring tool (which
is primarily intended to be used for offline rendering). Of course, not everything is bad, since
a graphics card is able to deliver a full-frame render in a mater of milliseconds!
Finally, let's talk a bit about the different sizes for the images used as canvas to bake onto.
The reason can be summarized in just one word: Opimizaion. If we take a look at the sot
shadows that objects have around them in real life, we will noice that those shadows don't
have ine details (small variaions). Knowing that, we just use small images to save some
memory, and the graphics card performs some filtering on them when used to cover a bigger
area on screen than the normal size of the image. It all happens without the shadows looking
"pixelated" and, even beter, without the shadow loosing the main element for its idenity:
Softness. In the end, the trick is twofold: Tileable images to be able to cover big areas with
small resource consumpion, and small lightmaps to get a good inal appearance, also
preserving resources as much as possible.
