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So I have a base mesh that has several other flat meshes shrinkwrapped to the surface, like decals. This works great within Blender or when exporting a still model, however exporting any character animation results in the shrinkwrapped meshes falling off of the meshes they are supposed to be on the surface of. With some careful work on bone assignment I can actually make it look more-or-less okay, but there's still unpredictable z-tearing due to having almost overlapping meshes (likely exacerbated by 32-bit floating point arithmetic).

What I'd really like to do, and what would simplify life greatly, would be if I could bake the color data from the base mesh and all the associated shrinkwrapped meshes onto a single texture suitable for application to the main mesh, and then delete the shrinkwrapped meshes which are no longer needed. It would also save some geometry.

Is there a mechanism in Blender to quickly bake all of these shrinkwraps onto a texture, or will I be stuck having to edit the texture by hand to add in the contributions of the "decals"?

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    $\begingroup$ Create a texture for the main object (or its retopologized copy) which should be unwrapped as well and bake a normal map from all the desired objects. You can bake multiple objects to one normal map, just select main object as last one. Related blender.stackexchange.com/questions/2466/… $\endgroup$ – Mr Zak Sep 19 '17 at 11:14
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    $\begingroup$ @MrZak Thanks - that got me in the right direction. I was looking here to do a diffuse map, and I admit I knew about baking normal maps from a high-poly source to a lower-poly target, but never thought about doing the same with a diffuse map. Baking the diffuse textures with "Active to Selected" and a small but nonzero ray distance worked perfectly for baking the shrinkwrapped meshes! If you want credit, feel free to add that as an answer - I'll accept. $\endgroup$ – PMV Sep 20 '17 at 3:08
  • $\begingroup$ You can add answer with what worked for you instead so to show others what halped you $\endgroup$ – Mr Zak Sep 20 '17 at 18:28

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