3D Max Baked Shadows and Random Rainbow Speckles
Recently, I had a project which required me to prebake shadows onto the texture maps I exported out of 3D Max. The original render before baking was applied can be seen in Image 1.
All models were attached to form one editable poly. Render texture was applied, creating a complete map. The new texture, “teapot checker.tga” was rendered. A new material was made with “teapot checker.tga” as the diffuse map. The material was applied to the scene and rendered. [Image 2]
So, where did the rainbow speckles come from? I have no idea. It seems that Max is baking random color information to all grayscale shades, but it leaves color information unaltered. I don’t know why this happened, but, I figured out a simple way to repair it. I opened teapot checker.tga [Image 3] in photoshop, selected the grayscale areas, and used the Hue Saturation tool (cntrl U) to bring the saturation down to -100. I resaved the image, updated it in my material browser in Max, and re-rendered the scene. The final corrected image, with shadows baked in, (all lights were deleted from the scene) can be seen in Image 4.
