Baking Question

[Kirk]

I've got a question about rendering effects to textures. I know one can bake light sources to the textures, but what about light traced elements such as the object emitted light and bounces.

Edit: Yeah, I meant DalekSteamrunner as a file name

[DaAan]

you mean like in your render where you have the light of the bussards in the alcove being baked into your texture map yeah? tis possible to bake this. but i dont know how you'd do it with MR but i have done it successfully using vray as my renderer as long as you have the GI and stuff set up correctly (and again im talking vray) as you render to map your UVW map in max vray will still generated the GI correctly and render the UVW with these FX in place. tho i will say i have found it easier to do this with the model textures set to black but using a saved irradiance map and light cache so i can composite the effect later in photoshop over my uv map.

as ive been going on about vray here again i dont know how you would do it with mental ray. but the only way to achieve the effect in the default scanline would be to fake it putting lights in the scene where you wanted to simulate boucing and render those out 1 lot at a time and again composite them in photoshop or which ever 2d app you're using.

again this is assuming your using 3ds max.. but the overall techniques should be applicable.

so basically as long as your renderer will compute the light bouncing and GI. as long as you save the solutions before out putting your render-to-texture map the effects should show up correctly in your uv map output

[Kirk]

I understand what you are saying, but how to I get the renderer to affect the baked textures? I see the option to set the renderer, but I can't get it to work. :?

[DaAan]

theres a good tutorial in the max help files for this if you do a search in the tutorials section of the help files for texture baking it'll walk you through the process. and as i said as long as you've set up your renderer OK it will render fine

[Nighthawk]

I think I might have an answer for that, but let me get it straight:
you want to make the texture that goes inside the bussard housing to be "lit" by the light coming from the bussard itself, right?
if so, I take it that you plan to make the bussards to actually "emmit" light?

[Kirk]

Yup, I was letting the alpha channels be the light source. I ended up just faking the effect with red omnis, but knowing how to do it properly would help.

[Nighthawk]

it's tricky, but it make a nice effect.
letme get home and I'll edit this and post a detailed inside-out.

I got stuck so many times with it that I think I figured it out already.

[Kirk]

Awesome, thanks a bunch!

[Aeries]

*watches this thread very closely* >_>;

[Nighthawk]

sorry, it's going to take longer than expected.
I started to build this as a Word .doc so it would be easier to read, but it crashed and ruined the file. I lost most of the beginning of the file, but nothing that's not fixable.

it's just that I hate to rebuild something that came up "in the moment". I'm no more in that "moment" so it won't be the same. I'll see what I can come up with.

EDIT: it's coming along. I'm including some UVW mapping explanations too. it's looking like a "mapping for dummies" kind of tutorial, but I think I covered most of the hard parts.

[MarkyD]

Hmmmm thats like one of those things thats really easy to do... but hard to explain  :o

renderbaking is nice though, but keep those textures high, on the bake and lower them afterward, or u may get fugly bakes