Cycles Rendering vs Baking

[PurpleShine]

Hello,

I am working on a point and click game, I build my scenes in 3D in Blender and export them to Unity. I am working very
hard lately to get the graphics at the highest edge but I stumbled on some things that makes me doubt how to make what I really want to make. The game I make is in this moment made with camera mapping, I made a scene in 3D and then use a rendered image, uv map the objects with project from view and put the image(s) on the objects. So the scenes look already nice, but now I just have the thought to make the game into full 3D, meaning that all objects can be seen from all sides, so therefore I need to uv map all the objects again, which is no problem by any means. But I did a lot of baking tests into cycles and the baking textures look very different from the full rendered image/rendered textures. I mean to say that the rendered image is far better quality than the baking quality as far as I can see. I already read a lot of threads about it, and that one cant use fresnel or specific shaders (like glass etc) for the baking. So my question is: Is there a way or a method that is user-friendly and that I could somehow use rendered textures instead of baking for the whole object/s? I already thought about making the objects split into two so I can put two rendered images, one for the front and one for the backside, but this seems a bit tedious, and is double as much work. Is there another or better method for this or did I miss something? I hope someone that understands my problem could help me. Thanks in advance!

[Zentient1014]

Did you straight up bake the entire scene onto 1 texture? That would be very low resolution if I am understanding you correctly. Really you’d only bake the light/shadow maps like this, then texture everything separately with tiled textures and so on… hope I am not misunderstanding.

[PurpleShine]

Thanks for the reply but no, not at all, I just mean to say that the render quality seems superb over the baking quality. I would like to get the same quality for baking as in rendering. I can post a picture comparising this evening, you surely will see what I mean.

[PurpleShine]

Left picture is the rendered picture, right the baked one. Aswell the rendered aswell as the baked are rendered on 50 samples, not so high, but it shows already the big difference. The rendered images are superb in comparison to the baked textures. So the only way I could think of is to not bake but render the object from all sides like a skybox and then uv it with project from view and put the images
on it, one on every side, but if one does this by hand it takes far too much work, I am surprised that there doesn’t seem to be any addon for this or another solution. If anyone knows, please help me… I try to get the best quality out of cycles and it just doesn’t seem believable that one couldn’t get the same quality images with baking…