Cineversity

Hi there,

When following the sketchfab upload tutorial instructions, I have problems with my baked assets. They all come out either red, orange and yellow and do no wrap correctly. It’s an absolute mess, do you have any suggestions?

I am using Redshift lights in the scene but, even after removal, the bake still is completely wrong. I have baked one wall here to demonstrate.

Please help!

Hi Maloficu,

Please share your file. I tested the plug-in with R19, and it works fine. If you need an upload link, please let me know.
Otherwise, reduce the file to the object and the material (Save Project with Assets…)

You might try as well to back the original object without the checked Keep UV option, this might be the problem. Anyway, guessing is the least professional way of solving things; hence, I ask pretty much always to get a scene file.

If the baked textures show already problems before it is exported to Sketchfab, then this is the wrong place, the Q&A forum would be. But first, let me check the file.

All the best

Hi Dr. Sassi, thank you for your speedy reply.

Could you please provide me with an upload link, it seems I cannot compress the work file small enough to upload here.

Thank you

Maloficu,

The upload link is already in your Cineversity Private Message [PM] box.

You find this [PM] pretty much in the top area of the website.

Cheers

Thank you, I have uploaded a sample file to the link provided.

Thanks for the file, Maloficu.

The UV information is not useable. Try to bake the object with the Keep-UV set to off.

Since you have had not included the textures, (Save Project with Assets…) I can’t really do anything.

I will leave the drop-box open for you and have a look in the morning into it. (Pacific Time / Los Angeles, CA)

All the best

PS: Since I haven’t had heard from you, I have sent you your model back, with working UVs. Which is one of several ways to do it. Perhaps not the way you would texture it, but I had no information.

You will find screen-shot from Sketchfab in the folder. I uploaded the model privately to see how it works: All fine. Of course, it was set to private for the short time it was there. I deleted it, of course after the test.

If you bake now the texture (or object), it should at least sit well for the tests.

I used R19 since I have no information that they have an R20 version ready to run.

My best wishes for your project.

Good morning Dr. Sassi, apologies we missed each other, I’ve only just got into the office myself.

Thank you very much for your assistance, I have downloaded your file and all seems spot on. I just can’t figure out why we can’t replicate on our end.

As we bake our textures/object, we still get this orange colour scheme (see attached). All of our materials are currently being generated by C4D or Redshift, am I missing a step here?

Good Morning Maloficu, or here: Good Night.

Hard to tell from an image. How large was the baked image? Please note that I have no hardware that runs Red-Shift.

The materials are not the problem, the UV setup is.

I went to each and every object in your file and organized the UV data. Open my file as you got it and go to the Layout> UV Edit.
I will show it here in the attached screen capture:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/qpbgiQr8QxgdceEF22pr5HOs8OHdV8aE98W4jnsUEUF

Since I’m not aware how well you can work with UV, I thought that this little intro will help a little bit to point you in the right direction.

With that knowledge, you might have a look at the images, in the UV Editor and check how the UV polygons cover the areas of the images.
This should give you a hint about what happens.

Again, without the textures, I can’t tell you anything more.

Main Menu> File>Save Project with assets.
Yesterday you had shared as second file the backup-file, which doesn’t contain the images. The file with the @ sign in it. I don’t need that.

I will soon move this thread to the Q&A forum, as it is about your project, and not about the tutorial. It’s just an organizational step.

The drop box is open for you for the next few days.

All the best

Thanks for the textures, Maloficu.

There is no simple fix or anything that can be done with a few clicks.
Please have a look here:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/R6jun9uptl6dE6CL5402VMYQLp9KMFsogXx8yijqaIK

East and West wall, both have the same problem. It looks like as if it was baked with spherical projection, which has no place here.

BodyPaint 3D has an option to sort the UV and remap the texture to it. But that is not at all what I would even remotely suggest here. The area of the texture that has information is not very large, I would say not even 1/5th, to remap it would mean to up-res the texture, and the quality would go very low.

The red spots on the towers, If it was supposed to have concrete (gray) on it, then the wrong material is used.

I do not have Redshift (no compatible hardware at the moment), so I have to guess which texture is on what object. The UV gives me some hints, But with the towers, I’m out of luck.

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So, let me ask you, did the model had at any time all textures as you wanted them? Do you have a screenshot? All before you used Bake of course.

Cheers

Thank you Dr Sassi, a good evening to you I must have copied over the incorrect files yesterday, my apologies. I have re-uploaded now, both original set up and non-Redshift versions.

Your UV introduction tut was excellent, I am beginning to understand how our lack of understanding when modeling has had a long term impact on our finished product. I have gone through and replicated your demonstrated technique to clean up our UV’s.

Here is a snap shot of what we’re getting after we address the UV issue, the great news is we no longer have that orange colour throughout, but I’m still perplexed as to why we now have a mosaic-tiled pool..

I am heading out of the office now, but will be available anytime convenient for you. Again, your time and assistance is greatly appreciated.

Have just seen your last reply, thanks.

Please see screenshot before bake. These are now all C4D native materials and I have simplified everything.

Maloficu,

The last screen-shot is clearing things up. Now I see where you want to go with it. Thanks a lot.

I have sent you a single object. Open it DO NOT bake it. When open, start the SketchFab plugin and upload it. This is just to give you something that works, I have tested it with Sketchfab. All fine. I will discuss the things I see in you model and what it needs in the morning.

As far as I know, Sketchfab is not supporting tiles, so that needs to be done with the UV directly. Baking while automatically creating UV will not work with your project, if the quality is wanted. This is manual UV work. Then Bake - if at all.
More tomorrow. It is close to 11pm.

ENJOY.

Hi Maloficu,

The last screenshot shows clearly the direction you like to go to. In a nutshell, you want to bake the light you get from Redshift.

I assume that the tutorials series is watched and the content is fully understood. If not, please ask. I have watched the series again this morning, and I can’t see anything significantly different from the current Sketchfab offers.

Leaves me to urgently point out to read this text:
https://help.sketchfab.com/hc/en-us/articles/201766675-Improving-Viewer-Performance

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With these three things, your target, the great series from Donovan, as well as the tips for optimization, you should have a good base.

The scene as it shows in post #11 and the given geometry/texture, requires to understand the logic that is given with the three parts listed above.

Sketchfab allows only for one material per polygon. What does this mean? If you take the tiled floor and pool, for example, it could be created with more polygons, and with that, the UVs could overlap and provide a ‘tile-repetition” to a certain degree. The balance that is now needed is the sweet spot based on mesh density and texture resolution.

There is a big but in it, as I can see, you have Ambient Occlusion [AO] and Global Illumination [GI] on (Both together kind of doubling the effect in some areas, BTW). Anyway, the light that is rendered in this quality creates unique situations for every single spot on the surface. As a result, any form of optimization with reusing texture/image information is canceled. The good news is that the mesh has no need to get any denser. However, the texture for a large model like yours and the ability to dolly-in requires dense textures, which will challenge any performance.

If the light would be without GI and AO, the model could have some more polygons, to take the UV polygons and overlap them on the texture. As an extreme, you could have a single Tile image, and for each tile needed a square polygon. Extreme…, not suggested!

We have now two extreme positions, and as usual, something between these two is the sweet spot, where details, light, and performance are nicely balanced.

There are certainly more sophisticated ideas to optimize it, but also here, the sweet-spot is between time investment and display performance.

All of those ‘scene/object-parameters’ need to be explored from the early stages of a project. Then weighted to produce from the start a priority list. This gives a more precise idea of what to do at each step of the production.

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Going through the geometry of your project, it sometimes has nearly no density, and sometimes for no reason (AFAIK) a vast destiny. Then some elements can’t be seen from the inside, but those are modeled and have UV polygons as well texture on it. Which, in return, takes space during baking and wastes pixels of the textures.

Another part that could be explored to use Normal mapping for the water surface, and keep the density there as well low.

All in all, I have too little information about the project’s target, to say anything with absolute certainty, so check my suggestions.

Let me know what the parameters of the project are, and I will follow up with more input.

Please check your object and their polygon Normal directions, they are not always perfect.

All the best

P.S.:

Based on the idea to find the sweet spot between heavy mesh and a tiny image file, or a dense texture (including light/AO/GI in the image), I have set up the pool in two ways accordingly.
In both cases, I have rebuild from scratch the pool model, so it will work flawlessly for the given task each time. To be compare-able the baked version here was around six times larger.

You can just open the files and upload them to Sketchfab. Do not bake them at all, they are really ready to use!

I hope this gives you an idea about the difference, especially how long a model would take to load

Scene file
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/llCiGRNkPUgkQCygPBZThupY9X7yMoSRTX7rxz4r6qe

Have a great weekend

Maloficu, You asked about the problems with the Tower.

The central Tower should be done again from scratch. Sorry, but there is too much that doesn’t work. There is no quick fix nor trick to make it work. Please have a look here:
Screen-shot.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/DDLL5hWakqWBUK5d9459yiOxx29LOQPWGojKIRhb8pf

This is just a detail shot, the problems are all over the place. I assume, at least it looks that way, that a Plane with a large number of four-sided polygons was cut and extruded and again, as well as some operations where I can’t even put my finger on how I would get there, in terms of the problem. Again, sorry to be so blunt, but what else can I say. You want to publish this on Sketchfab, and then it should be pristine, right?

First, I checked the Normals, they are all over the place and Cinema 4D tools that usually bring order into this, will not solve this here. I tried to optimize the points, to get rid of some double polygons, but they are not precisely congruent either, so no luck. Next stop was, of course, the Attribute Manager>Mode> Modeling> Mesh Checking. Not so much luck there at all.

So, I exploded the model (Main Menu> Mesh> Conversions> Polygons Groups to Objects…  This gave me the core of the Tower: ‘Object.65’.  Which ended my hope to get the double layered Polygons as separate objects.

Long story short: The most straightforward way would be to use the Main Menu> Create Tools> Polygon Pen and ‘retopologize’ the object. In this way, you will get a clean and less dense model. If this is done correctly, the sorting of the UVs will be fun. The baking of it, while Keep UVs on, will work presumably with no trouble.

Of course, I couldn’t resist modeling the core of the central Tower, and the UV is done as well.
Scene file and screen shot:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/QgIhg8v4h7MtqVD72vwCFjFeWsLh9p7xTeWYCT1ECyr

I hope that gives something to work with.

My best wishes for the project.