Baking Textures

darianbarnesdarianbarnes Posts: 0
edited December 1969 in New Users

I've seen some YouTube videos on this...I'm but still kind of lost with baking textures on a mesh...does anyone know of a general process I could use to do it, or if there is a tutorial out there that maybe I haven't seen? Thanks for any help.

Comments

  • SzarkSzark Posts: 10,634
    edited May 2013

    What do you want to know?

    Baking Textures is done from the Surface pane.

    Post edited by Szark on
  • SassanikSassanik Posts: 340
    edited December 1969

    My silly question about this: why do they need to be baked? Does it do something special to the texture? As opposed to simply saving it?

    Amy

  • SzarkSzark Posts: 10,634
    edited December 1969

    Baking Textures: Mainly used for the Gaming Industry or animations I believe. The norm is to bake the lighting effects, shadows and reflections etc on to the textures. But in my expereince it takes just as long to bake as to render. Granted if the scene is static then making a series of renders would take a while but when the textures have been baked then rendering a number of frames would fly as all the effects have already been baked so no need for the original light rig.

  • BWSmanBWSman Posts: 0
    edited December 1969

    I've made textures sets from procedural shaders by baking them. For that you need even lighting to avoid highlights

  • SzarkSzark Posts: 10,634
    edited December 1969

    Another excellent use BWSman

  • WandererWanderer Posts: 956
    edited December 1969

    I realize this is a very old thread, but it's the one that came up on my search, so... Maybe this has been answered elsewhere, if so I'm sorry. I'm pretty noobish at this, so also sorry for that.

    What if I want to render some objects in Reality, but since reality handles distant lighting differently I decide to bake the lighting onto the objects then render them in Reality with a transparent background? What will be the result of doing that? I'm trying to figure out if the objects will look better rendered in Reality into an image and then used as a layer in a Vue scene in a way that the distant lighting matches the rendered lighting of the background scene. I like some of the materials/surface options in Reality better than in the standard Vue engine with my currently limited set of mats for Vue.

    Is this a dumb idea to try? Anyone have any opinions on this?

  • mjc1016mjc1016 Posts: 15,001
    edited December 1969

    Firstly, Reality isn't a renderer...it's an exporter for Luxrender. Yes, lighting is different...as in a lot closer to real life.

    Baked effects, in a photrealistic, physics based renderer are the worst thing to do, since the lighting/surface calculations are making the assumption that the materials are physically plausible. One of the plausible elements is energy conservation. Baking in the lighting throws energy conservation out the window.

    Your best bet...match the lighting.

    You should be able to do this by loading your scene in Vue and then, without the characters, just the scene, make a 'light probe'/HDR panorama that can be used as an environment light in Luxrender. That way, your lighting will match EXACTLY, because your Vue scene is the light source for the Luxrender render.

  • WandererWanderer Posts: 956
    edited December 1969

    That's an awesome idea. Thanks. Now I just need to go learn how to do that.

    Thanks again. That's great.

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