New to Cheetah3D -- baking

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brian.hammond

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New to Cheetah3D -- baking

Hi - I'm about a week into learning Cheetah3D and wanted a step-by-step tutorial on texture baking, as it is really really useful for games (or other apps) that have static lighting.

Here's my notes. Let me know if they are useful or obvious. Thanks :)

http://brianhammond.com/bake.pdf
 
I think if you're trying to make a useful tutorial it's worth showing how to merge multiple objects using "import children" so that a complex mesh can have a single baked color / light map.

The other odd thing is that you're baking a pool ball, which is likely to move around and look wrong (with static shadows burned into it.) For games there's two distinct uses for baking (that I know of, there are probably others):

1) Producing shadow detail for terrains or buildings -- stuff that doesn't move around
2) To bake more realistic lighting into models to be used in addition to dynamic lighting.

In the first case you're essentially baking quite harsh, directional lighting into a piece of terrain which isn't going to move around (much). In the second case you're baking soft, fairly spread out lighting into an object which is going to be moving around, and may well be dynamically lit (including having real-time shadows rendered into it).

The former option is used for older games and isn't used much in recent games where dynamic shadows are popular.

The latter option is used for modern games to make models seem realistic.
 
Last edited:
podperson said:
I think if you're trying to make a useful tutorial it's worth showing how to merge multiple objects using "import children" so that a complex mesh can have a single baked color / light map.
Click to expand...

I haven't even gotten that far in my usage of Cheetah3D. This is more my notes than a proper/good tutorial :)
 
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