by jjsca » Fri Dec 26, 2014 2:28 pm
Hi Tom to bake textures to get more realistic looks you can use the method described here in the SD wiki:
Unfortunately the blender version used is rather old, I managed to get it work some time ago but wasn't very satisfied with Blender Internals results. I switched to cycles some time ago and now it has got baking implemented (it's quite recent). I found this video which explains pretty well how to create the baked texture.
It even is pretty easy to set up and cycles manages global ilumination so the shadows will be smoother. I frankly am a blender user and have not tried out ac3d's toolset or other alternative tools, but I guess Chad's method is also fine.
For the color map you can use gimp, photoshop, illustrator or inkscape (+bunch of others), frankly results doesn't really depend on the tool, just use the one you are the most familiar with. I tend to use vector graphics as they are really easy to edit and you can easily resize the entire image, but at the end of the process I still need to switch to gimp to add transparency and the baked map.
Hope it helps.
Have a nice day.
J.J.