Depth to color?

[popwfx]

I guess what I'm asking is baking ambient occlusion?

But say I've been painting depth on a layer and I want to convert a particular layer's depth channel to shaded color (maybe using ambient shading or maybe using whatever the current viewport lighting is) and I want to make that a flat colored texture which can "look like depth shading" but is in actuality just color.

The reason I want to do this is we are having different settings in the game engine where some people with less powerful cards can turn off normal & spec textures and have better performance. Having the ability to bake this depth into a color, lets me create an alternate color texture that looks closer to the full look than just the color channel by itself.

What is the easiest way to do this?

At present I'm exporting the depth layer to Photoshop, masking out the bumps I want, inverting the channel and then reimporting as a separate layer to "darken" the color texture. Is there an easier way to do this from within 3DCoat?

thanks

[Carlosan]

desaturated and add with overlay helps ?

[puntoit]

This really sounds like ambient occlusion. When having baked(merged) from the voxel room to the paint room using using "merge with nm" I get an extra layer for ambient occlusion as a separate paint layer. This can then also be duplicated for a more dramatic effect and so on. I guess this is what you are looking for.

[popwfx]

This really sounds like ambient occlusion. When having baked(merged) from the voxel room to the paint room using using "merge with nm" I get an extra layer for ambient occlusion as a separate paint layer. This can then also be duplicated for a more dramatic effect and so on. I guess this is what you are looking for.

Thanks, puntoit, but (as usual) in my case, I am not sculpting as the source of my original models, so I only have a polygonal model imported and painted with PPP in the Paint Room, so I really want ambient occlusion I guess for the depth painting I do in the Paint Room only or via normal maps - but transferred to just darkening a duplicated color texture. This gives me an alternate lighter-weight color texture that at a glance can look like it has depth shading, but really is just color - this is for when people who have less powerful graphics cards play the game, they can get a look closer to the the full depth/normal maps, in the case that they turn the depth/normal maps off in our game to increaes performance.

desaturated and add with overlay helps ?

thanks carlosa, but the problem is the depth is independent of the color - so say I have depth to show a texture in the sole of a shoe, if I turn off the depth layer the sole looks flat. So to "shade" the sole with color that looks like the painted depth texture, I need to export that shoe sole layer as displacement map, bring it in photoshop, invert it, (and maybe edit it or blur it) and then import it back into 3DC as a color layer to multiply with the existing color layer. Make sense what I'm trying to do?

So I'm still not sure how to achieve this easily without a million steps taking the exported depth to photoshop and then importing back again...