no, it's not too difficult. First of all, i suggest you use the new blender 2.46 release because they fixed two important bugs about targeting textures for baking.

To bake textures, lights, etc, you need:

- Textures to receive the baking (correctly applied to the meshes via any of the unwrap options)

- Textures or materials IN your meshes, so they will be baked (if you want textures)

- of course, lights.

I suggest to start with simple cubes and objects to understand the process.

Thanks for tips I am really, really interested in this process.

I have found two nice tutorials:

http://www.vimeo.com/385595

…texture baking video and…

http://www.scifi-meshes.com/forums/dojo/...ure-baking.html

…simple tutorial with cube, but they both use something they call UV Face Select Mode that I don’t have in my Blender modes drop-down menu.

I have downloaded new Blender 2.46 Zip Archive and Blender 2.46, Python 2.5 FreeBSD file. Does anyone knows what I must download in order for this mode to appear?

for UV Face Select Mode:
it is in the same small window, where you switch between Object Mode and Edit Mode.
It is called UV Face Select

Yes I know it should be there but I have, unfortunately , everything but UV Mode:

Weight, Texture, Vertex Paint and Sculpt, Edit, Object Mode.

As I see it I should have installed some plugins or maybe some of that Python things

Blender really does informs me that I don’t have any Python installed in that first DOS-looking window

latest version doesn't have it.

in edit mode you need to open uv's (in another window). while in edit mode press "u" to deal with uv's and stuff. i can't be more specific because my pc doesn't like blender so much, so i have some bugs to sort out.

julz

It’s a strange thing about Blender unwrapping I must be doing something wrong

I’m using CBabe as a test model (transformed in obj format) and everything is o.k. until I unwrap her (btw- her texture seems already unwrapped with every vertex at his own place). When I use Unwrap (smart projections) as indicated in tutorials Blender unwraps CBabe in totally unexpected way- it seems he only makes different vertex positions and leaves texture totally unchanged. So texture is un-touched and vertex position is all different???

Is there something I must do in order for Blender to recalculate texture and not just vertex (as in MED’s Atlas Mapping where there are big changes in texture map)?

i think smart projections is more meant for architectural geometry. for characters and organic stuff i would mark some seams and use unwrap to get better results.

you have to keep your old uv-set and bake the texture to the new uv-set but i haven't done this before in blender so i don't know how exactly this would have to be set up. you have to experiment a little.

Success

In UV/Image Editor window (with UV Face Select Mode and CBabe all selected in 3D View window ) I go to Uvs->Scripts->Save Uv Face Layout Then I save CBabe’s Tex-Vertex Map as an TGA image file (that Blender marks as …_mesh.tga) When I open that TGA in UV/Image Editor Blender treats it as a UV Map and all I have to do is click on Bake->Full Render and… MAGIC! My CBabe model has shadows - Baking Done! Hura!

I don’t know if this is the best way of doing it (and if it’s really that good because I am posting this moments from doing it in Blender) but I hope when I try more complex model the result will be satisfactory…

Thanx to everyone who helped me…

Nope…

I called it to soon: still not good. Very strange shadows and strange pointer on walls

If anyone baked some nice shadows in imported obj files please share process steps… Thanx.

make sure there are NO overlaping UV faces, I use 2 UV sets one UVTex for the materials, and one called baking. set the UVTex as rendering uv set and set baking as active uv..maybe that is backwards...??? anyway try that.