RTT Baking Textures

[ctk111]

I want to learn how to bake textures with Vray and I was wondering if the tutorial on the spot3d website is the most up to date tutorial out there? If anyone knows of a better tutorial or would like to share their methods, I would appreciate it.

 

Thanks.

[Dave Buchhofer]

what do you need to know? 99% of RTT is building a good UVW unwrap, theres a lot of tutorials on that, though mostly focus'd on Charachters, it should net you the required skills.. if you're not building one by hand, you can get semi decent results with a Flatten mapping, set to .001 spacing and 60-75angle threshold. also useful is the Flat-Iron plugin from 3d-io, which can let you map multiple objects into 1 uvw easily without the pain of attaching/detaching

 

other than that, bake in vraycompletemap (for exact-ish replication) or vraylightingmap (for use as a secondary lightmap in game engine with tiled textures (Channel #2 (Lightmap), and #1 (diffuse) respectively)

[ctk111]

I'm fine with unwrapping. It's the other half you're mentioning. Under mapping coordinates there are two options. One is for automatic unwrap and the other says use existing channel. Since I'm using an uvwunwrap modifier should i check the use existing channel and choose the channel which my uvwunwrap modifier is on?

 

Also, on the spot3d site it says to add the completemap, then bake and load the baked texture in to the material editor. I would like to bake in the lightmap as well. So once I render the completemap I'll put that in channel 1 and the lightmap in channel 2?

 

Thanks for the flat-iron suggestion. I'll look in to that as well

[cupsster]

You have multiple options here... It's dependent about what you want to accomplish.

1st: you can bake 2 maps complete map for your diffuse texture and lighting information as second map.. In this case they must or may have the same map channel

2nd: you can use vraycomplete map in self-illumination slot as your diffuse map or combine it >> complete map = diffuse and lighting map = self illumination

3rd: you can bake just lighting information if you plan to use it in some sort of engine usually on 2nd channel, first is diffuse [may be overlap or be tilled and thus detailed]

4th: by baking complete diffuse map you can get rid of multimaterial [which is usually expensive in game engines] but you must do unwrap

 

Tip: try to do some box testing, it's very useful for sorting things out

[Dave Buchhofer]

you're really only after EITHER the vraycompletemap if you are not going to use tiled/seperately mapped diffuse/spec/etc.. OR the VrayLightingMap (OR TotalLightingmap.. depending on which looks better for that particular scene)

 

doesn't make much sense to use both.. the completemap includes both the diffuse textures and the lighting, so setting that to 100% self illuminated should net you the same basic result as keeping your diffuse on channel 1, and placing the vraylightingmap in the self illumination on channel 2..

 

I tend to lean towards the lightingmap option personally, since by using lighting map and the normal tiled diffuse textures, you can get away with overall smaller resolution textures, than if you were to try and keep everything in the completemap since you would need such a high resolution to encompass the diffuse detail texturing

[BrianKitts]

I want to learn how to bake textures with Vray and I was wondering if the tutorial on the spot3d website is the most up to date tutorial out there? If anyone knows of a better tutorial or would like to share their methods, I would appreciate it.

 

Thanks.

 

The spot3d tutorial is a pretty good guide still..... with one exception. They totally skip the steps to precalc a single irradiance map for the entire scene.

 

Basically make a camera with 360 focal override and animate it throughout the scene, normally only takes 20 frames or so to catch the entire scene. Once you have the irriadiance map to render from your textures will render twice as fast, and you won't have any light leakage and the edges of your textures.

[cupsster]

compete map make sense if you merged some smaller parts of model to one and you are lazy to do you texture homework.. with combination of lightmap you have only one drawcall per model and one material per model.. pretty simple