Help a newbie!

[Necora]

Thanks should go to @Paeng who originally shared me the link

[Paeng]

shared me the link

Oh, glad you find it useful too... 

* Yeah, it's ridiculously efficient - I'm able to crunch my (sometimes lengthy, 20 to 30 images) journal posts by close to 50%...

[kid1293]

@Necora -  I have tried your way of making an AO map for a model.
I have a house with 3 build. UV stacked on top of each other on (the only) texture.
So I followed your tutorial earlier in this thread. Mesh model was superb!
But... build 1-2-3 were all brown and useless with the new method.
Do I have to name the AOmap different for each model?
I have all my models and points in one fbx.

[RedKetchup]

i think. if you check apiary, it has 3 AO for the 3 build

[Necora]

@kid1293 glad it worked! For the mesh at least.

Regarding build stages, it depends on how you build them. I would use a new AO bake, and so a seperate AO.png, for each build stage. If you try to use the same as the final mesh, you might have the problem that shading is in the wrong place now that a baked face is no longer there to cast the shadow, so the shadow will remain even if the face that cast it is gone.

I don't know how you make build stages, but I start with the final mesh, delete all of the walls, and add a lot of beams and things. Even if I make my beams by copying and existing one, and so copying the UV positioning, they won't necessarily have the same shading and interaction with the face around them. Plus as soon as you scale the beam, even if you keep the UV in the same place, the shading will become distorted. I think AO needs to be individual for each face in the model, so it is probably best to bake each build stage individually.

But having said that, I don't use AO on the build stages. I have one small white texture in my mod called 'buildAO' that all build stages use. This is to keep mod sizes down, esp. as for the most part build stages don't stay around in game very long so I don't think they are as important. I am trying to put more effort into the build stages though, just not in terms of AO.

[kid1293]

No, I use separate AO maps but there is something with Blender...
I have stumbled into this before. One of 3-4 parts work but the other
parts are very dark brown. Eventually i find it but right now I am
very happy with your answer - I decided that build stages are
not that important to waste time and effort on since they are a very
short time on the screen. Reading that my solution with a white AO
is OK by you too really lifted a weight off me. I first thought I was cheating.
They look good in game. Not much detail to cast shadows.


Thanks! I send you a nice picture of 'lessons learned'.

[RedKetchup]

woah ! so much detail in last shot !!!! look so great

[kid1293]

Thanks to Necora but there are a good 2000 triangles too.

[RedKetchup]

Thanks to Necora but there are a good 2000 triangles too.

just 2 k ? thats very good too !

[Necora]

House looks awesome @kid1293.

I never really bothered with AO when I started, because I couldn't figure it out right. Then I was determined to make a good one so spent a solid day doing nothing but messing with AO, and came up with a method that works. Just the contrast and framing it gives the edges between wood beams and faces I think makes a lot of difference in the 'feel' of the model, and it also does a great job at tempering the, in my opinion, drastic lighting changes between rain and sun in game. Something I don't do, that I should, is play around with the values more. So the Factor, Add or Multiply, and the Attenuation distance. Also, there is the fall off as well. I don't know how much these will make a difference in Banished, but one bored cold winter day I will mess around more and see.

Glad I could contribute something!

[kid1293]

Then I am confident I can leave it to you to do the dirty work.


Just a joke, I am good with the values you found. For now.
I maybe take a look later on to see if they can be changed depending on
if I want, for example, a more rundown, dirty look on my model.

[kid1293]

@Necora - I think I found the error with AO.
Blender seems to ignore/misinterpret all but the first model if I have
several models and AO map them all.
Some setting are probably reset. I did go over all and it looked OK. But...
My solution is that I AO map them separately and then copy/paste
into the combined file. Cumbersome but working. Will test some more.
I'll go back to my other projects and test if I can make this work with them too.

edit - @jesta030 I am sorry for spinning off like this, but it was discussed here
so I took the liberty to elaborate on it.

[jesta030]

Don't worry about it. I'm learning aswell.😀

Look what i found on blend swap: http://www.blendswap.com/blends/view/23807

[Necora]

@kid1293 that is odd, I've never had that problem before. I always work in 1 file when I have F-variants so I have done this in single .blend that have 7 different models and their build stages and I've not had a problem with it coming out differently for each one.

A couple of things I can think of. 1 is saving the image. You have to do it once it is baked and with that mesh selected, because if you tab out of that mesh then for some reason it changes what images are displayed in the image viewer, so you might be saving the wrong AO. I've done this before, where all came out right apart from one which had funky shading, and I think it was because this happened, I accidentally saved the AO from another building.

Another is where are the meshes located in the file? It seems that AO doesn't just bake the selected mesh, but if another mesh is close enough, it will also cast shadows. It seems to use everything in the scene when it bakes, not just the selected mesh. So you need to make sure you either bake 1 then scale the mesh down to .01 ready to export, then bake the next, then scale it, then the next etc. Or move them far away from each other so they won't interfere with the next bake.

Not sure if these are the problems but it is all I can think of.

[Tom Sawyer]

Following the AO discussion I finally have it too. I think I always failed because I did not add a second UV map in Blender. It was the missing thing for me. Great Thanks to @Necora for this hint!

Now I make 512 px AO files for all my models in this second uv map. It increases the pkm by about 150 KB per model. It's not much and absolutely worth in my opinion. It looks really better in game now, especially in rain when the sun disappears and no direct shadows are created. I also have the impression that the game is calculating something with the AO file when it lights the model. So I would suggest to create a separate AO file and not build it into the texture image. Another reason is that AO clashes with overlapping faces in the texture map. For a better result for my models I increased the brightness of the texture in Photoshop but probably I also can brighten the AO itself. It avoids that my models become too dark or grey in game.

I still have one small problem with the AO. It seems that it also affects snow overlay in winter as you can see in the picture. I would like to see it fully snowed like without AO. Has somebody any idea how to solve this?