You find the Bake-Tool at the Top Blender Menu under the  “Render” Tab. Or in the Image Pop up menu of the UV-Image Editor.

Bake from Top Menu

Render -> “Bake Sculpt Maps …”

The Baker panel opens up. If you invoke the baker tool from within Edit Mode, then only the currently selected object gets baked.

If you invoke the baker tool from Object mode, then depending on what objects you have in your current selection, the Baker panel shows different information:


The Baker can distinguish between Sculpted prims and normal objects. While normal objects can not be baked, they still can be used to serve as bounding box definition. In the example above i have selected three Objects:

  • aSphere (Sculptie)
  • aStar (Sculptie)
  • aCube  (normal object)

The object list is shown in the Baker tool separated by normal objects and Sculpted Prims.

Bake Menu Parameters:

  • Color Range settings:
    • Red X, Green Y, Blue Z (default: 100,100,100):
      The color range settings allow you to narrow down the number of used colors for Red, Green and Blue color-coding of your sculptmap. this is equivalent to shrink the visible portion of the object.The values are interpreted as “percent of available color space”.  By narrowing down the color range you can create tiny sculpts. Side note: For OpenSim which uses 8 bit color ranges the smallest possible bounding box length in each axis is theoretically 1/256 cm (roughly 40 Microns). But due to a constraint in the image uploader the smallest allowed color range is 4/256 cm  on each axis, which is equivalent to a cube of size 160 microns (0.16 millimeter)
  • Object settings:
    • Include Objects in Range Size
      enabled: Use all objects to calculate the smallest possible bounding box which fits to all objects.
      disabled: Only use Sculpted prims to calculate the smallest possible bounding box which fits to all objects.
  • Sculpties settings:
    • Aligned and Optimise
      These parameters depend on each other, so we will look at them together:

      Aligned Optimise Effect
      Do not care about alignment on vertex level. If Aligned is disabled, then all parts will use their full color range and thus the maximum possible spatial resolution. Sculptie parts  have best possible resolution (100%  of the full color range) but no alignment on vertex level.
      Sculpty parts  have best possible resolution (100%  of the full color range) but no alignment on vertex level.
      Align all vertices to the grid of the smallest possible bounding box which fits to all objects. This ensure that matching sculpties really match on vertex level. As a drawback the smaller parts get less color range and thus less spatial resolution. (spatial resolution gets worth  with smaller parts until minimum color range is reached)
      Same as before, but in addition find the biggest multiple of each partial bounding box which fits into the overall bounding box, and scale the part up to that value. This allows to increase the color space but still keep the alignment intact. (spatial resolution is guaranteed to be in the range of 50% – 100% of the full color range)

       

  • Reset Origin (default: enabled):  (was Keep Center)
    The default behavior of Primstar-2 is to recalculate the geometric centers of each sculptie. If you do not want that to happen, because you need to keep the object Origin where you defined it, then you can uncheck “Reset Origin” and Primstar lets your Object Origin where you placed it. In any case the Object Origin is placed into the center of the final sculptie’s bounding box (or the part’s bounding box for Multipart bakes).For single sculptie bakes the Object Origin will always be used as Center of the Object bounding box. The value of “Reset Origin” influences how the baker deals with the Origin as follows:

    • disabled: The baker keeps the origin untouched. Depending on where the
      origin is located, this can have massive impact on the results. For example
      if the origin has been place at one side of the object then the object bounding box
      will only be filled on one side. This can be used for doors for example which need
      their rotation axis outside of the object center.
    • enabled(default): The baker moves the origin into the geometrical center of the sculptie.
      This yields the best possible range resolution (100% of available color range)
      caveat: The move of the object origin is permanent!

    For multipart sculptie bakes:

    • disabled: The baker keeps all origins untouched. The bounding boxes for each
      part are calculated as described above (origin in center of part bounding box)
    • enabled: The baker moves the origin of each part into its geometrical center.
      This yields the best possible range resolution (100% of available color range)
      caveat: The move of all origins is permanent!

     

  • Rename Maps (default: disabled)
    By default the name of the exported sculptmap-image is derived from the name of the image to which it has been baked. When enabling this option, the name of the exported sculptmap-image is derived from the Object name.

Bake from UV Image editor

Image -> “Bake Sculptie Map”

You always can make a “Quick Bake” from the UV image Editor. The object which is associated to the currently selected Image will be (re)-baked. Here you can not specify any parameters. You will always get a full color range bake. And the baked Object will always have its Origin in the Object Center.

 

Tiny Sculpts.

You have 3 options to create tiny Sculpties:

  1. You can modify the Color range in the Bake tool
  2. You had to add some scaling Objects which force a color range reduction on all Sculpted Prims in a link set.
  3. You can use a one to one scaling between Blender and your Target system (e.g. OpenSim, etc…)

The first two methods have been already discussed above. The one to one scaling is a very convenient alternative which allows you to mix normal scaled sculpties and tiny objects within one multi-part object.

All you have to do is scale your objects to the Blender Size, where One Blender Unit is counted as 1 Meter in your virtual world. For example if you want to create a Cylinder of size then you only need to ensure that the Object dimension is set in Blender to Blender units. In the image below please look at the Dimensions-values:

When you bake the above object, then the resulting sculptmap will be automatically adjusted.
Note: If your Object is smaller than 1 cm on all axes, then it will automatically maintain its scale!

The above example uploaded to a targetsystem (like OpenSim): I placed the smallest possible cube besides a set of 4 sculptie cylinders. All 5 objects use the exact same size of <0.001, 0.001, 0.001> in SL-meters. But the sculpties maintain their aspect ration and they show exactly the size as we have used in Blender ( < 4mm, 4mm, 8 mm> )

HINT: In the Scene Property Settings you can switch Units from None (Default) to “Metric”. Then your Display shows much easier readable notation: