Hey everyone,
So, this is about a small issue with Blender's baking, which occurs whenever trying to bake ambient occlusion or shadowing to vertex color, which is the main way to bake light in Plasma.
This is something that's been bugging me for a while, and I wanted to find a solution I could use in my automated light baking script. I thought it might be worth bringing this up in case Korman devs are interested in it too.
Have a look at this:
As you can see, there are some nasty artifacts causing non smooth shadowing where I added the arrows. It's really annoying on the lower part of the mesh, which is supposed to be a completely smooth cylinder. It looks like Blender somehow doesn't understand that some faces are linked and using smoothing, and should therefore use the same vertex color. I'm not sure what causes this, maybe some error with one of the faces considered above the other, or something alike. Either way, it's quite ugly.
There aren't many topics speaking about the issue, but I found one which had a working solution:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthr ... -in-Python
The code one of these guys posted gets rid of most of these artifacts. Here is the previous mesh with this algorithm applied:
Much better !
There are still some unusual stains on the building (near some edges split by an edge split modifier, and some near the lower part of the mesh), but most of it is gone (what remains really doesn't stand out).
The only issue is for meshes which don't use an edge split modifier, because this will automatically smooth the whole mesh... Personally I always use edge splitting anyway, since that's how vertices are stored and rendered in Uru.
Here is a snipped of my version of the algorithm - I tweaked it a bit to suit my tastes (the original smoothed edges by taking the average color for each vertex - this one uses the brightest instead)
Well, I don't know if this will be useful to anyone, but I thought it's worth sharing, at least.