You are right about overlapping- I used Blender's consolidate in to one image tool to put all model textures in one png and used that image as a baking map. That’s why I had strange shadows- they where overlapping

Once I used MED’s Atlas Mapping to create single texture map it was all o.k. I also took your advice about using the same image twice (for tex and shadow map) and it worked great

…but now I have a problem in finding a good mapping tool When I use MED’s Atlas Mapping on files imported directly from WED it’s a disaster- textures are weird and partially washed up.

If after WED I go to Blender, use consolidate in to one image, import model to MED and then do Atlas Mapping everything is fine except it bugs-out if I put specifications bigger then 2048???

It bugs-out in a way that he doesn’t make tex-map but empty map So 4096 is out of bounds as far as I can tell and I can’t do nothing with 2048.

Is there some atlas or uv mapping tool that is free or maybe low-costly and works great as the MED’s Atlas Mapping but with bigger image resolutions?

I downloaded Ultimate Unwrap3D Pro demo but haven’t tried it so far...

Blender has far better mapping tools than MED. I think I have a tutorial on my site. it's almost* free. You could search for tutorials though.

Does this mean that you exported cbabe with uv-map?
How did you achieve that?

Nowherebrain/
Everything points in that direction and I don’t understand why I can’t create atlas texture map in Blender

All I can create is different uv maps that don’t recalculate, change or do anything with texture. Only way I could have done that, is with MED’s Atlas tool and now- with Microsoft DirectX SDK and their uvatlas tool but in this last case texture in a new object is all weird

It’s almost unbelievable that I can’t do nothing to recalculate and rearrange my textures so I can bake them. I will try to find some tutorials but as I see it creating atlas texture should be straight and automatic process?

Pappenheimer/
In CBabe case is simple to bake shadows because her texture is already fine (non-overlapping). All you have to do is convert her to obj format, save her texture with different name in some folder (I like to make that second image TGA), open CBabe.obj in Blender and in UV/Image editor window ( while in UV Face Select mode) open saved picture on top of original map as a texture to be baked to. That’s it.

Has anyone worked with Microsoft DirectX SDK and uvatlas.exe tool? My new texture map comes up all weird and misplaced

"All you have to do is convert her to obj format"
My interest is how I can convert her from mdl to obj. How did you convert it?

I downloaded FBX Converter from:

http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=6839916

I first saved CBabe as FBX and then converted her to OBJ.

Thank you!

You don't really want atlas mapping(well you might). You want the model to be as island free as possible...in blender enter edit mode(tab)>change your selections to edges(ctrl+tab),edges>select the edges you want to use for a seam(like slicing)>mark seam(ctrl+e)mark seam>select all(a key)>then unwrap(u),unwrap.
You will need a minimum of two views for this one 3d view and one uv image edit view. If you are unfamiliar with what I am talking about, check out my free video "meshing around in blender". It is located on my tutorials page. It should give you a basic understanding of blender(very basic).

Nowherebrain/

I’m afraid it would be no good for me to try anything manually with my models because I was modeling complete rooms in wed and complexity of the models confuses me- I wouldn’t know where to begin with edges. I could break every room in 5-6 groups of simpler objects (that’s what I’m doing in my method ) and then manually re-map them in Blender but it’s too much time consuming.

Thanx for helping and I really liked your video- it’s very informative and an-eye opener . Blender seems to have every important modeling function and it’s free??? I still don’t get it.

With Blender I guess you can save tons of money and have similar project quality that you would have with Max or Maya.


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As for Shadows-On-Textures I have managed to put a method that seems to be doing the trick:

You need 3 programs for this:

GStudio 7
Blender
Fbx Converter

Steps:

Save your WED-Model to FBX.
Convert your WED-FBX-Model to OBJ with FBX Converter.
Import OBJ-Model in Blender, do consolidate into one image thing to put all textures into one and save as FBX.


…now the weird part…


Import Blender-FBX-Model in MED (there should be only one mesh & one skin) and save it as FBX again(overwrite if you want).
Import MED-FBX-Model in WED, save texture in WAD and save everything as MDL.
Open WED-MDL-Model in MED and save as MDL again.
Open MED-MDL-Model in MED, do Create Atlas Mapping, delete old non-atlas texture and save as FBX and MDL.


…this weird part is here because I couldn’t do the atlas mapping any other way. The key thing before creating the atlas is to make sure the texture is on the model. For some reason it’s not enough to see the texture in MED’s 3D View - you have to click Engine Preview to make sure it’s there. In most cases texture was present in 3D View but non-existent in Engine Preview so Atlas didn’t recalculate it but have made an empty texture-map in that strange pink color. I don’t know if this will happen to everyone or it’s just my pc but this is how I must do it. Next…


Convert MED-Atlas-FBX-Model to OBJ with FBX Converter.
Import Atlas-OBJ-Model to Blender, do texture-baking thing, save baked texture.
Open MED-Atlas-MDL-Model (that you saved at the same time as FBX) and just replace old-atlas texture with baked one.
Baking over.

If anyone found a faster (or better) way of doing this please share your steps…

This was my way:
ingame light mapper contribution thread
Maybe, it is worth a try.