Flatiron pipeline/workflow anyone?

[salcorp]

Has anyone here successfully implemented Flatiron in their production pipeline? I mean, I work with arch viz and some render times on our animations could really improve with baking but I've been banging my head on the wall to get Flatiron working with a mixed vray+baked materials scenes.

Has anyone done this before and have the stats for what is possible and what isn't? My goal isn't real-time animations but improvement on current render times.


Thanks!

[percydaman]

I remember doing some research aways back into this. In the end I just didn't think it was worth it. Everything has to be completely unwrapped in the 0-1 uv space, it can be tricky getting good quality per rendertime, and making changes required alot of rebaking. I'd advise against it to be honest.

[jujubee]

I was playing around with this earlier today - trying to "wrap" my head around texture baking multiple objects for a game. I also had another situation in which I had to export something to DAZ (client insisted on having a person using a product...) Of course, I do everything in VRay and just wanted it exported to DAZ simply (had to break it back down to standard mats using a script.) The method seemed to work cleanly - at least a lot easier than the built-in method of baking object by object...

[dbuchhofer]

I've been using flatiron extensively to bake out scenes for use in realtime engines, i'd say it is pretty solid for that, i've submitted a couple bugs to them, and they have replied back within days/hours with either workarounds or fixes.

I haven't tried to do anything with it for animation, I don't know how useful that would be. its somewhat determined by how 'solid' your geometry is going to be in terms of changes, vs how much time savings you expect to get per frame... Quality can be iffy also depending on how your model was originally created / unwrapped. there are a few face configurations that can lead to large spikes in the unwrapped texture, and identifying those can be a bit tricky at first until you learn what works/doesn't work.

Overall, i think its great. but i'm using it for a different purpose.