Blender further progress

[CSXT Q-317]

I have been sick for a few days. But I have been feverishly aggressive with learning blender as my fever has been aggressively working on me.

So far I have learned a great deal on how to do a lot of things.

With that said, probably the first serious project I attempted was a building for my Ohio Division. I had a little fun with this one as I decided I wanted to learn how to bake shadows into a texture.

I overdid the shadowing here for illustration purposes but as those who are sitting on the fence can see, just a few days and I have this.

Here we see the model sitting in a place on the Ohio division which this winter I will begin to either strip down and replace things or build anew. This model as I look at it will need a few minor adjustments. But I feel it is nothing I can not handle. I went from zero knowledge to this in quite literally a few days.

In the background, you can see a TSM-made Chillicothe Union Depot ( DO Tower ) which is also in the blender pile being worked on.

[eric]

Are the windows and doors inset, or textures on the flat plane?

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

[CSXT Q-317]

Are the windows and doors inset, or textures on the flat plane?

Sent from my SM-S911U using Tapatalk

On this one they are inset. Might eat up a little performance I still have to test what I have so far.

Have not mastered the Boolean Loop as of yet.

[wacampbell]

...
I overdid the shadowing here for illustration purposes but as those who are sitting on the fence can see, just a few days and I have this.
...

I usually bake my AO full contrast like you have done. Then I add it as a layer on the texture image in my paint program. That way I can adjust the intensity with my layer controls.

Wayne

[pwillard]

Exactly, I do the same. I can adjust the amount of shadow using my image tool. Luckily, mine is really good at layers.

About AO baking though...

You might not run into the issue right way, but the trick for me was NOT trying to bake everything at once... but to selectively bake using the "render" on/off filters in the collections box

What I mean is that there is kind of a trick to it that I learned... where if you have "stacked" objects, and you get a blackout shadow where you DON'T want one, you need to bake differently. It is related to how you might have mapped your textures.

If you get the improper "shadow", you need to then try the bake the objects individually, working your way outward, for the bake renders, otherwise you get unwanted shadow baking. That's assuming you are not separating all of your parts in the texture mapping process but are instead mapping them stacked in place such as you would have with a "project from view" UV mapping assignment. You then merge the AO BAKE into your image tool.

Hope that makes sense.

NOTE: This has been one of the hardest things in Blender to wrap my head around.

[CSXT Q-317]

What I mean is that there is kind of a trick to it that I learned... where if you have "stacked" objects, and you get a blackout shadow where you DON'T want one, you need to bake differently. It is related to how you might have mapped your textures.

I saw this happen on a more complex object. I think I am getting the hang of using the baked image especially when I tried to have the roof and the walls selected for the bake. I got a blacked out image. Took me a minute to get this figured out.

All of the things you say make sense.

I'm pretty pleased with what I have been able to accomplish in just a few days though.