To bake or not to bake?

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

that is the question.

Recently I have been designing more props and interiors for my medieval project and have wandered into something of a predicament. As I publicize as much as possible, I follow the philosophy of using seamless textures as much as possible to allow my customers the maximum potential to customize things to individual taste. This is pretty easy when it comes to landscaping and construction items, but it starts to fall apart a little In certain cases. For instance, you just cant make a bowl or plate look as nice with a seamless texture as you can with a baked one.


yes yes yes!


no no no!

This is a slightly stupid example. I could UV map the plates to better take a seamless texture, but still the subtle lighting qualities would be lost. It would look "ok"....ish.

So.....in my experimenting, I decided to make an old stone wall. Again, something that just didn't work for me going the seamless route.

Then I noticed the cornerstones on the houses looked flat and dull compared to the new wall. Curses!


So I quickly made some new cornerstones.......




Much nicer. Somehow it does not come through quite so strong in pictures, but the difference when viewed in-world is rather stark. Problem is, all of these new meshes look like crap when you put a seamless textures on them. The UV mapping can be set to take advantage of Baking or seamless, but not both. Even the way the mesh is constructed needs to take into consideration what kind of texturing you plan to use in the end to some extent..

So what should I do? Personally, I am lured towards baking more textures, but my business head says this is less useful for my customers.

Another part of my brain says "people wont care either way and your just being a fussy idiot". Anyone familiar with the very popular Studio Skye landscaping range in SL will know a lot of that stuff uses baked textures, meaning everywhere you now go looks the same. It drives me up the wall a bit, but people love it. I think even Alex himself noticed this and improved the situation somewhat with a few releases that used seamless instead. I dont want to be "that guy who made everything look the same", I want to be that guy who enabled people to be creative.

There is a third option of just hoarding all my baked stuff and just releasing "seamless" products......but that would be pretty mean. There is also performance issues to consider. If you bake textures then generally you need around x5 more, because each baked texture is unique to its item. Now, you can be clever and merge multiple items into a single map, but this will only take you down to x2/x3.

So I thought I would put the question out in the general forum. What do people think? Do you prefer baked textures which cant be customized but look great? Or items that use seamless textures, don't look as snazzy but offer more options to customize? I would to both but sadly there are only 24 hours in a day

[Dot Matrix]

I'd argue for seamless textures on building kits and landscaping items wherever possible. It enables the items to be used flexibly in so many ways.

For props etc, baked might be better.

OpenSim is a bit different to SL. We've so much land to develop, we need all the good quality kits we can get!

[Sherrie Melody]

Baked textures really make smaller items look very nice. You could decide to have your cake and eat it too. Bake the textures in, but make it so that the item can be retextured reasonably using seamless graphics. You could even go one step further, and in addition to that include a shadow map for those that want to create custom textures for your items.

[Amiryu Hosoi]

Bake, cake, are we talking food or....

Makes me feel hungry

Ami

[Dundridge Dreadlow]

crank your settings to max, and add a few in world lights, then decide.
You'll almost certainly pick non-baked lighting and maybe a faster computer.

Turn settings down to low, switch off the lighting, and you'll instantly pick baked lighting.

A middle ground would be to add dirt mapping or similar to give a bit of variety, or mention casually that multitexturing would solve this issue/debate instantly..

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

If this were just about me and my preferences I would know what to do. My PC has enough muscle for most anything. But I always try to keep my settings to Medium so I can see what the “average” customer sees. The aim really should be that it looks at least acceptable at all graphics levels.

Sherry’s idea of adding a shadowmap to the set for DIY texture folks might be a good middle ground, but still for most users I think that is “too advanced”. All of my sets so far work with zero knowledge requirements of outside programs. That is the problem I am struggling with here. How do I deliver good variation and customization direct from the box. No skills needed.

I think it seems I just have to state very clearly if the product in question uses baked textures or not and avoid it unless absolutely necessary. I can throw in a few colour variations and a shadowmap too.

[Dot Matrix]

I think it seems I just have to state very clearly if the product in question uses baked textures or not and avoid it unless absolutely necessary. I can throw in a few colour variations and a shadowmap too.

That sounds a good way forward.

[Serenity Sinclaire]

crank your settings to max, and add a few in world lights, then decide.
You'll almost certainly pick non-baked lighting and maybe a faster computer.

Turn settings down to low, switch off the lighting, and you'll instantly pick baked lighting.

A middle ground would be to add dirt mapping or similar to give a bit of variety, or mention casually that multitexturing would solve this issue/debate instantly..

1] Totally not where I went on "to bake or not to bake"
2] What's the difference between baked and seamless? How does it work?
3] If most people, myself included, cranked up the settings we wouldn't see anything...we'd see gray, lag and crash.

[GothixGrafx Utherwurldly]

So what should I do? Personally, I am lured towards baking more textures, but my business head says this is less useful for my customers.

I would to both but sadly there are only 24 hours in a day

The "Business Committee" in my head says "Fork It"!
Do a seamless and baked version which doubles your offering. IE (HouseV1.1s) and (HouseV1.2b)

But like me you only have 24 hours in a day. When I'm not doing custom work and have time to create something for sale I've found that the average users prefer seamless... especially when it comes to structures. They appreciate the simplicity of dragging a texture from inventory onto the object. No skill required and they can brag to their friends that they customized their cozy little home.

I bake a lot of custom builds because those clients are looking for detailed specifics. If you're dead set on baking then provide the UVW map. Even if they aren't capable of customizing then they can pass the template on to someone who can.

[Ozwell Wayfarer]

crank your settings to max, and add a few in world lights, then decide.
You'll almost certainly pick non-baked lighting and maybe a faster computer.

Turn settings down to low, switch off the lighting, and you'll instantly pick baked lighting.

A middle ground would be to add dirt mapping or similar to give a bit of variety, or mention casually that multitexturing would solve this issue/debate instantly..

1] Totally not where I went on "to bake or not to bake"
2] What's the difference between baked and seamless? How does it work?
3] If most people, myself included, cranked up the settings we wouldn't see anything...we'd see gray, lag and crash.

A seamless texture is as its name implies, it has no defined boarder or end, so when applied to an object it can just repeat over and over with no noticeable "seams".

Baked textures tend to be unique to an object or a group of objects. They are called "baked" because you can lock in lighting features such as ambient and specular lighting via your 3DS program. This generally looks vary nice but has a number of drawbacks.

For one, you generally need more baked textures vs seamless, as mentioned before, baked textures "fix in" detail, so they will look terrible on an object they were not designed for. They also look less impressive than seamless textures at close range, as you have to stretch one texture map over the entire object, rather than using repeats as with seamless textures. The upside of baked is that they look substantially more realistic than seamless textures at medium to long distances and they give people on any type of PC the impression of light and shadow, though with just "fixed point" lighting.

For a person like you on a low end PC, a large number of baked textures trying to render all at once will crash you out without a doubt. Here's a good article from Penny Patton on that issue.

http://pennycow.blogspot.de/2013/02/why ... fails.html

Its a pretty serious issue, which is why I started a thread on it. Customers in SL generally want baked textures on nearly everything, but they don't realize that it turns their sims into lag soup. At best they should be judiciously used. If I do go down the route of using more baked textures, I will certainly not be using them all over the place. Just where I feel it is essential.