Results on tinkering with Bake 3D

[yog]

Just had a go at trying to figure out this potentially useful plug-in last night, here’s what I came up with, (using MAX4.2).

All objects to be baked must be converted to Editable Meshes. This is fairly well known, but it took me a few times to twig to it.

I found that between converting objects to Editable Meshes and baking, I had to save the scene. If I didn’t save I always experienced a crash.

Although the Generate Texture Co-Ordinates function has a progress bar, the Bake Texture and Bake Lightmap functions don’t. Instead they start with a blank preview window, pause for however long it takes to process that object, flash up the baked texture, repeat for each object, and end on a blank preview window, with no dialogue in the middle. I found a common mistake I was making at the beginning was to assume the plug-in had failed (blank screen for long periods) and if I attempted to close the preview window before baking had finished I would get a complete crash.
The way I got around this was to open up Window’s Performance Meter and looked to see when it dropped back down to 0%.

I found the default settings Bake 3D uses when the Apply Texture function is used not to be too useful. It uses a blend material to blend the lightmap into the self illumination channel, but the lightmap is set to 0% in the blend, meaning that it doesn’t show up at all. Also the Show Map option isn’t switched on for each lightmap texture in the Material Editor. This can be confusing to navigate complex scenes in the viewport as each material is 100% self illuminated but without the lightmap shading.
It would be better if the Lightmap was blended correctly (strength 100%), and the Show Map option turned on by default.

Ideas for improvements.
Give the Bake Textures and Bake Lightmaps a progress bar and end dialogue like the Create Mapping Co-ordinates. At least then we could tell the difference between MAX freezing and MAX thinking.

Change the default settings for automatically applying the textures/lightmaps to those suggested above.

As a final minor improvement, how about a pop-up option when the Apply Textures feature is used that will ask if you want to turn off GI illumination ? After all this is the point of baking the lightmaps.

[Psy]

i spent a week a while ago trying to get it to work, and reading all of what you said finally let me do it. thank you so much!

[Da_elf]

id just like to add that in my window i can see the light maps being created. Possibly you can turn on show irradiance maps or something in your render dialogue. Dont know.
The main problem im getting with bake3d are the edges of the material IDs something to do with the alpha channel or something. when bake3d finishes its rendering i can visually see it trying to fill out the edges possibly in attempt to get rid of this problem, but it doesnt seem to work.

[kbalage]

Thanks for the tips, now I could get something else from Bake3d then pure black render . Although I still have problems with the edges as Da_elf mentioned, and couldn't find out how the image is mapped onto an object. Cos it isn't visible anywhere, at least I couldn't find. So I couldn't tweak the problematic parts of the map, only with applying an unwrap uvw modifier and rebulindig the whole arrangement. Is there any way to get an uvw map from the generated texture coordinates?

[shytigercp]

re

My problem is when I model and map say a brickwall with large split face cmu on the base and smaller bricks above, I use the mapscaler modifier (which is quick and easy) which I can't get to work right with bake3d. The material applied to the wall is a multisubobject material. Is using the mapscaler modifier a lost cause?

ST