padding in Max

[digiartist]

I wonder if any you guys can help me. When using 'render to texture' to bake in my occlusion shadows for my Hellcat I'm getting a pixel widths border inside my wires. I now have a nice white pixel border around my baked objects.
I'm just using standard GI with a skylight but even with adding extra padding and taking the shadow bias down to 0 I'm still getting this border. Reset x-forms as well.
In the past I've used Ronnie's e-light for doing this which is usually fine but I want to go with a GI solution to get a bit more shadow bounce around the details.
Any ideas what might be causing it?

cheers in advance:)

[krazycolin]

what's your spacing? and more importantly, what are your units? if it still does it at 3 try 4 or 3v3n 5... i have this problem sometimes when using vray... i get around it by going to 4 and sometimes 5... seems like a lot but for some reason it seems to be related to the units used in the scene.... strange

[kiwi123]

Hm.... padding does not do what it says on the box ? (I'll refrain from further guessage and commentage)

[Skyraider3D]

Should've stuck to E-Light :p

Seriously though... you're using padding (I usually use 16) but the texture comes out without padding? You are rendering to a file I hope (not saving out the virtual frame buffer, which ignores padding). Maybe show me a part of the texture so I can tell what's happening.

Maybe it's a light solution problem. I've come across this when baking shadows made with Skylight, but only for hollow single-sided objects (cockpit), which was easily solved by building a box around the object. I can't see why it would go wrong with something like a plane.

[digiartist]

Thanks Colin, Ronnie, I'll try your suggestions later on tonight and see if they make a difference. Having looked at the file, bizarrely, I have the unit setup at centimeters, which I never do...perhaps thats the cause of my problems. Will let you know how it turns out :)

[Skyraider3D]

Units indeed are important for global illumination rendering, but not for texture baking.

[krazycolin]

well.. if you are using GI for texture baking, as he is, then it is important.

[Skyraider3D]

I'd really need to see the output Gareth is getting to be able to judge if it's a lighting or baking problem though.

[krazycolin]

same here... gareth... could you post an image? or.. did you fix it?

[digiartist]

Well guys, I changed the unit size and rerendered with a higher padding level and still ran into the same problem. It's extremely fustrating as the map works well apart from the damn border. Anyway, I'm going to run an e-light pass to see if thats any different. Ive attached a half res version of the output I got from last night's bake.

same problem with e-light

[digiartist]

hmmm, I've just checked to see if there is a difference between two baked textures. One with a padding of 5 and the other with 16. There is absolutely no difference when they are overlayed. So it looks like the padding isnt even working :confused:

[Skyraider3D]

Indeed your rendered texture doesn't have any padding, so the background colour (white) bleeds into it. Sounds like you are saving out the virtual frame buffer rather than using "render to file only" option and grabbing the file from your harddisk.


PS. Mapping looks promising :)

[digiartist]

cheers Ronnie! That worked a treat :)