Hi, I have been working with Cycles for a while now, and I was wondering if someone has created a custom build or a plugin or something of the sort to allow Cycles baking. Thanks in advance!
Forgive my ignorance, I don’t do much realtime stuff, but why do so many people want baking for Cycles? What would it give you that the BI baker can’t do? It’s not like you can’t collapse textures, bake AO/normals/spec/etc. Is it just for lightmapping or something?
Baking the lighting and bounces to textures that can be called back in a shadeless material for game engine…
Once you’ve tasted Cycles nodes and OSL, going back to BI is a sad, sad experience. And yes, lightmapping too.
No, it doesn’t exist yet, and the main developers have no interest in developing it. If it ever happens, it will likely be a long way down the road.
Right, no interest.
Pity, it was my only hope for quality baking in blender.
BI?
Well, no interest in developing it either.
The worse solution for baking. (IMHO)
-No AA
-Weird interpolations - noisy results on normal, bumps, AO maps.
-Baking on 4 or 8 k textures, scale down after, does not fix the problem.
Obviously, it explains the poor quality of the blender made assets around.
I recommend an external application for the job.
However, if pre generated textures is what we may need,
If you gonna bake a wall texture, a relief, to wrap it after around some construction,
Cycles can bake, I mean render, excellent AO, depth 32bit exr and color or specular maps.
Quality maps I mean, nothing to compare with BI poor results.
I bake AO in BI all the time, and I don’t get noisy results because I increase the samples to a range that is really high like 30 or even 60 , and I walk away from the computer for awhile. Default settings are on like 5 samples, and they suck.
Baking Textures out doesn’t have too much of a problem if you are not baking full render - I don’t bake full render, I bake the things I need only.
@Craig
I’m facing serious issues when trying to bake from existing UV maps to a new UV set-texture
Especially when converting bumps to normal maps.
The case when no multires or active methods are selected.
Are you familiar with this workaround?
AO, yeah, I’m also using lot of samples. When there are overlapping objects, serious artifacts around.
I will try some tests and see what I can find - I haven’t done much with baking geometry to normals past simple game asset objects, and I know you have a much more detailed and higher resolution object to work with than I do.
Overlapping objects cause me troubles too, but depending on my need I separate them out to different layers and bake individually. I know that probably doesn’t help much.
@Craig
I wasn’t talking about high density sculpting baked on low dense base + Normal maps bumps etc.
You are aware of the follow active quad UV unwrapping and all these techniques on sculpt using UVs and displacements.
It is easy to convert such overlapping UV islands, bake them to a second set - typical unwrapping.
32 bit exr bump converted to a tangent normal map with the right tangent co ordinates.
It works in blender but as I mentioned, I have some weird noisy interpolation-like effect.
Same happens when transferring color diffuse texture to a second UV set.
Okay, I think I understand - I will experiment on that and see what I find here. If we find a constant, we might submit for squashing then
Thank you Craig, please let me know.
I was going t report it but I’m not so sure.
Try to triangulate the mesh first, it might help.
Not a great workaround but it’s only the map what we need.