Step By Step

bake TEXTURES ON PARTICLES

01 Go Generating Particles

to the Polygon shelf and then create a sphere. Select the top half of its faces and delete them. Now press Ctrl/ Cmd+e and extrude it out however you like, to create a bowl. Create a torus from the Polygon shelf and set it as you prefer. Find a balance, make it small to look realistic but not too small, otherwise you’ll require a lot more of them to fill the bowl and that’s gonna suck!

03 Projecting texture

Create a shader for the torus objects. Give it a diffuse map. Once the menu opens for you to choose your map, right-click the File button. You’ll see an option for Create a Projection. In that, add the diffuse texture you want to use. Now you’ll get projection nodes that will project the texture on the geometry. Create a new camera and parent the node to that. Manipulate the camera to taste.

02 Unfolding UVS

Select the torus and duplicate to create 100 copies. Select them all, go to the Modelling menu set> mesh> combine to combine all of your torus copies. Now go to the UV menu and open UV Editor. Select all the Polygons there and under the Polygons menu, click Unfold. This will Unfold all the torus copies into a single shared 0 to 1 UV space. This is a very important step – do not mess this up.

04 Baking textures

Go to the Hypershade, select the Material as well as the mesh, go into the Edit menu bar and click Convert to File Texture. This turns your projection image into a usable separate material and distorts it to your UVS, rather than distorting the UVS to fit your projection, which would throw out everything we have done up to this point. The new file generated can now be used as a texture.