texture baking and animation

[RevitGary]

I am a newbie to animation. Just trying to figure out the basic concept.

I use mental ray.

 

Is baking all the textures the way to go to create an animation?

 

It seems like it would cut render time to a fraction of a still mental ray image. Would the quality of the animation be the same as if you did it with regular render? Or would it be noticeably "game like"

[BrianKitts]

If you take the time to do it right you can avoid the "game like" effect. Using properly sized resolutions for your maps, and precalculating the irradiance for the entire scene will save you from getting any light leaks. Those two are the biggest quality killers.

 

As for the whole "is it worth it question" I think it is worth it for small scenes, for really large scenes I would say no it's not. (assuming you have the renderfarm and time to render) It's great to get the quick render times from a baked scene, but the hassle of baking a large scene is such a pain that I would rather just push the scene out to the renderfarm without baking and settle for 15 minute frame times as opposed to spending 2 days baking the scene.

 

Small scenes are pretty easy to prep for baking and you don't have any really large surfaces to worry about baking. Baking the floor of a room is no problem, baking and entire street with a quality map requires cutting the street up into sections so you can get a reasonably sized map for the size of the geometry.

[nelpiper]

Hi there, Brian is right.

I'm currently working on baking an small interior scene for being used on a Realtime software and it's just a nightmare. I'm talking about a small room. MR is pretty smart as far as calculating a lighting solution if properly tweeked. Unless your gonna have any interaction on your scene, go for the good old pre-rendering stuff.

Good luck.