Baking lighting...not reflections

[mmikee]

I was wondering if there is a way to bake the lighting into the textures, and still be able to calculate reflections while using the baked textures.
Ill admit, it sounds pretty impossible, but I was just curious if anyone had
ever done this.

Regards,
Mike

[percydaman]

I dont see why it wouldn't be all that hard. Render to texture the lighting, replacing the current shaders on your objects with the baked maps, then just throw on the additive reflections.

[vlado]

Yep, what Percy said, it should be quite do-able.

Best regards,
Vlado

[mmikee]

Thanks for the replies. I am going to do some tests. I need some very
large shots from inside a concourse.

Regards,
Mike

[gunny263]

any followup on this?
Did you use the Vraylight material w/self illumination and exclude it from affecting any other direct and indirect lighting calcs, standard material and exclude it from the scene lighting or did you just render the reflections out as a second pass and resort to compositing?

[mmikee]

Well for the project we were on at the time of this question, the reflections werent really an issue, because the spaces that were baked
were not close up. Also they were seen only briefly through windows.
I still havent had time to test the reflections with baked textures. Being
self-illuminated seems a bit tricky to me.

Regards,
Mike

Edit: Actually the deadline was the main reason that the reflections were
"not an issue"

[gunny263]

Edit: Actually the deadline was the main reason that the reflections were
"not an issue"

Ha! Sounds familiar

[Clifton Santiago]

I don't think you really can bake reflections because they are view dependent. I haven't done it recently, but in 1.47 I tried baking reflections into a diffuse map, from a certain viewpoint. The resulting baked reflections were actually calculated from the "viewpoint" of the geometry normals rather than the camera viewpoint. The reflections were raytraced, but they looked very wrong.

[mmikee]

I am actually getting a chance to test some stuff. I am not sure how the baked textures in the self illuminated slots will allow for reflections to computed at rendertime (not while being baked). Ill post any info I can.
Meanwhile, any tips would be great.
Basically, I dont want to rerender the walls, clg, mabey the floor, each frame. To clear up the noise in our animations takes to much sampling
and rendertime. We have a very modest farm.

Regards,
Mike

[Neilg]

Cant you just paint reflection/refraction maps over the textures with the baked lighting?

[mmikee]

For a still, mabey, but for animation ? I am not following you. What do
mean by painting the reflection maps ?

Regards,
Mike