Dark smudge where points meet together on sculptie textures

Submitted by Samira on 4 February, 2010 - 14:36

Texturing

There's almost always a dark smudge on the textures I bake for sculpties at where multiple vertices meet (like at the poles of a sphere sculptie), and I'm not sure how to get rid of them.

open the poles a bit (select

Submitted by gaia.clary on 4 February, 2010 - 15:11.

open the poles a bit (select the vertices, then press the [smooth] button once). then rebake. sometiems it also helps to add a level of subsurf or 2. BTW you can keep the pole open on the sculptie. just set the sculpt type to "sphere" in world. Then the hole will be closed by the viewer. All vertices of the top/bottom row will then be collapsed to one point. I believe it is just the first or the last vertex in the top/bottom row which determines the exact location of the pole if you use that method.

Another way to go is: Create a duplicate of your sculptie for the texturing. Open the poles as i explained above only on the duplicate. Then use the original unchanged object to bake the sculptmap and the duplicate to bake your surface texture. Doing it like this will keep you with the absolute control over the pole position on the object

I've always smoothed the

Submitted by Samira on 5 February, 2010 - 00:44.

I've always smoothed the poles to get rid of the triangle artifacts, but it doesn't seem to fix the smudge. The smudge doesn't seem to be present on the texture at all.

I tried uploading a sculpt map with the poles open, and the smudge is still there regardless of what sculpt type I set it to.

I've attached the sculpt map and the texture of one of the problem sculpties.

Attachment	Size
pedestal_tex.tga	191.31 KB
pedestal_map.tga	12.02 KB

well... i checked that and

Submitted by gaia.clary on 5 February, 2010 - 03:03.

well... i checked that and indeed i found that i could get rid of the effet only with a trick: i took the next row of vertices and scaled it down until it was very near to the first row. The smudge disappeared. I am not sure why on your sculptie the effect is so apparent. Maybe it is because the whole surface is uniquely colored...hmm, recently i had a similar problem i remember now... Have to check that ...

Attachment	Size
pedestal_map.tga	11.8 KB
pedestal_tex.tga	525.87 KB

Normal direction

Submitted by Domino Marama on 5 February, 2010 - 14:07.

This looks like an artifact from the normals direction. As the shape isn't closed, the normals on the edge are different to the flat face. There's no really simple solution, but the quickest is to extrude the hole, scale to 0 and remove doubles. Then assign the new triangle faces to a dummy image. This'll correct the normals and put the new faces where they won't affect the texture baking. You'd usually do this on a texturing only model and assign it's baked texture to the UVTex layer on the real sculptie.

The problem is NOT the

Submitted by gaia.clary on 5 February, 2010 - 15:01.

The problem is NOT the texture bake. I checked that multiple times. The texture never is smudged at the pole (if taken care properly as you mention). The problem is visible in blender when you set view mode to Texture. And it is visible when you import the Object to SL and even when you specify the Blank texture "no texture" the smudge still remains.

The only way i could get rid of it was:

- collapse the frist row of vertices to 0 (make the pole

- scale the second row of vertices down to a tiny ring around the pole.

This reduces the effect to almost invisibility. If you collapse the secnd row of vertices into the pole, the effect fully disappears in SL (on LOD3 and LOD2 at least).

Just to mention: The effect also appears when the object is set to fullbright. And THAT i can not understand at all because fullbright effectively disables vertex lighting in SL.