Animation - Texture Bake or Pre-Calc GI

[Smile of Fury]

For an animation where only the camera moves, is it more common to pre-calc the GI or to bake the lighting and then render with all the lights/GI turned off?

 

Are these the two most common methods? And...could anyone explain to me (or direct me to some reading) why you would choose one option over the other?

 

Thanks in advance.

[Nicolai Bongard]

Not done much of either, but one thing that might be negative with the bake method is that you would have to unwrap your geometry, so a pre-calc would be my preferred method.

[frog_a_lot]

For an animation where only the camera moves, is it more common to pre-calc the GI or to bake the lighting and then render with all the lights/GI turned off?

 

Are these the two most common methods? And...could anyone explain to me (or direct me to some reading) why you would choose one option over the other?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

I've done a fair few animations.. and i have never ever baked the lighting/textures in.. and i dont know anyone else who has either..

Always use precalc of GI

[Corey Beaulieu]

Agreed. Baking your lighting and GI would only make sense to me if you are moving your scene into Unity or some other type of gaming engine.

[John Dollus]

Baking the lighting was a great technique back when Lightscape was around. Animations rendered with diffuse GI in seconds using processors equivalent to an iPhone by today's standards and it was a very simple matter to comp in the shiny bits. Now, it's a bit of a broken pipeline as the programmers tend to just throw CPU calcs at a problem instead of being more efficient but if you have a simple space, it's worth exploring.

[Smile of Fury]

Thanks for all the input. I actually am working on some Unity stuff, but rarely do any animating. Just asking more for personal knowledge. Seemed that texture baking only made sense on very very simple scenes and it's kind of an all-or-nothing decision if you want to bake.