Texture Baking (Again)

[podperson]

I agree with Willem (as usual)

I don't much care about multilayer PSD support. It's nice, but ultimately just a minor issue. I'd love to have the option of baking procedural textures...

Lightmaps can be used in really obvious ways (e.g. baking shadows into terrains) and less obvious ways (e.g. baking ambient occlusion/radiosity into spaceship models so their nooks and crannies are darker).

I might add that a lightmap tends to require a gigantic texture with distinct mappings for every polygon / polygon group in the scene (with the possible exception of those polygons entirely brightly lit and those entirely in darkness) -- although in general the UV mapping is done *before* the lightmapping, so this kind of optimization isn't done in practice (by automatic systems anyway).

 

[Targos]

Awesome Martin, Absolutely awesome.
AaronC

 

[AnotherJake]

Just wanted to chime in for my support of texture baking. I also agree that PSD support is not at all necessary up-front.

 

[Targos]

Hey guys, tried the demo today-Impressed -Love it! So plan to join you here soon-

Re Psd, in my limited experience, Maya doesnt even support psd, I've always had to bake using tiff files...

My 2c>What exacly I do in maya is an ambient occlusion pass, and then a directional (or other) Raytrace pass. Maya then has a layered texture node, so you can define what goes on top. The top layer (A photoshop blend of both AO and Raytrace passes) becomes an Illumination (V similar to multiply) blended Layer on the second UV set, and the bottom layer on the Layered texture node is the origional material with base texture.

An example is here_
(Warning, contains animal rights campaign>You may begin to be offended, Upset and outraged>Mature Content>
http://www.unifycommunity.com/contests/explosivo/Targos/ExplosivoUB.zip
)

It was to be a contest entry but I changed my mind about that at the last minute. Its a set that will be used for a few purposes. I wanted to show a few people anyways...

You'll notice the ground shadows look a bit daft when the ground starts getting blown apart under the dwelling, but I'm trying to dynamically blacken the ground with a decal to disguse this weirdness. Enjoy...
AaronC

 

[Martin]

Hi,
my current approach is to bake all light channels you want in one texture. For example you can just render the diffuse and radiosity component to the texture. But if you have dynamic shadows you might be interested to just bake the radiosity component. Or you just bake the color channel of the material.

Bye,
Martin

P.S. Here is a small update. As you can see I've already solved the problem with the white lines.:smile:

 

[podperson]

Very nice job on the seams. I'm really looking forward to playing with the next beta (or alpha ;-) ).

 

[Martin]

Hi,
here is another screenshot. This time a lightmapped cornel box.

Bye,
Martin

P.S. Especially check out the beautiful new toolbar and tag icons by Frank.:smile:

 

[Targos]

Lookin real good Martin, thank you for taking the time to work on this...
AaronC

 

[hairball600]

Looks really neat. Three cheers for Martin & Frank!:icon_thumbup: :icon_thumbup: :icon_thumbup:

 

[squareitround]

This should please a lot of people who use Cheetah for creating assets for Unity.

The oven baking icon gave me a chuckle.

 

[podperson]

Very nice icon and great to see this progressing.

 

[ROI]

Yes, thank you Martin - this will be a fantastic thing to have.

 

[bigkahuna]

Hi Martin,

This is looking very encouraging!

My 2 cents on baked texture output options:

I also don't really need multilayer .PSD support. I use Unity which supports this, but I generally create .PNG files and then assemble them later in Photoshop if necessary. It just seems easier for me to keep organized that way.

Another app I've used for this (Carrara 5 Pro + "Baker" plug-in) allows the user to selectively export any number of baked map "types" (texture, light, procedural, etc) either separately or combined. This would be the ultimate in flexibility and should please everyone.

One more thing that would be awesome to see in Cheetah is some sort of Normal Map or Bump texture baking... guess that would have to wait for Cheetah 4.4, huh?

 

[podperson]

I'm not so much worried about outputting to multilayered PSDs, as supporting multiple sets of vertices (in particular, one set for the lightmap and one set for the textures)... But I think Martin already has this well in hand.

When* Unity has Tech5-ish support** we can worry about baking renders into multiple Photoshop layers.

* This won't be any time soon.

** This is the new engine from id that supports one giant texture map for an entire world map and pages appropriate bits of the texture into memory as required ... in which case the color and light maps would probably share UVs but have different resolutions.