Baking textures/shadows/reflections

[mhinks]

Hi all

 

After reading an article in Digit this month about a mummy presentation for the british museum, they mentioned that they used texture baking to speed up their rendering for the 2000+ pixel wide animation. They had modeled a vast egyption city, baked all the lighting and shadows.

 

I've been playing around in max with its texture baking, and done the tuts in the manual. It seems a very cool tool for game models/characters, but to use it for architecture or products would be good.

 

So far I have baked a spot light with shadows onto two spheres sitting ona plane. Its made 3 new materials and the viewport now shows the shadows. Very cool! but now I've added a skylight and baked the textures again. It doesnt seem to bake the light tracer shadows onto the textures.

 

Can the baking only work for standard lights/shadows? How would you use the technic if your spheres have raytrace on them?

 

Does anyone know anything more about texture baking, and can shed some light on the situation!?

[abicalho]

Baking does work for Light Tracer Shadows, but it doesn't work for Raytraced Reflections because they are view dependant.

 

Do a simple test to see it working:

 

- Create a Plane

- Create a Teapot

- Create a Skylight

- Add Light Tracer

- Render to test

- Open Render To Texture and select the plane

- Add a Complete Map

- Render that map

SEE: That plane has shadows.

 

Alexander

[mhinks]

Thanks for the info abicalho. Ill give that a go. Have you had much experience of using baking? Can you surgest some good uses and times to use?

[pailhead]

I think it would be more useful with radiosity since lighttracer is real slow, its excelent tool when you're doing realtime visualisations, and when doing animations, it can speed things a lot.

[abicalho]

You can bake things that do not have:

 

- Transparency

- Reflection/Refraction

- Bump or Displacement

 

After baking, you will still have to adjust the final materials (Shell) so that it renders the baked results. You also will not want lights to be on, nor the exposure control, or else you will be illuminating or computing exposure twice, since that has already been done for the baked material. You may want to add reflection/bump/displacement to the baked material after it is done.

 

Hope this helps,

 

Alexander

[mhinks]

Thanks so much guys. Tht really helps me get my head round baking. Sounds like a very cool tool for animations.

 

So it sounds like I can make my scene as usual. Once I have it ready to render the animation, I can turn off opacity, raytrace, bump, bake the lighting, delete the lights, and turn the mats back on in the shell baked material. That should save a bit of time over a long ani.

 

If you have any tips from you past experiences with it, id be grateful if you could note them here. Like I noticed in my test, that you would have to have a pretty high res baked texture to keep the detail in the shadow edges?

 

Thanks again