Texture baking, getting all the details from the high res onto a low res.

[Undersky]

We've just moved to Maya (from C4D, but me myself is actually a long-time 3ds Maxer) and I'm hoping we'll purchase V-Ray, as that's what I've used both in C4D and Max for years. I'm wondering about texture baking, though. And this question can equally be my lack of knowledge of Maya, since I'm rather new on it. But here goes:

We sometimes do realtime projects involving large CAD files, which we trim down (usually using Simplygon). We then want to put V-Ray shaders on the high res model (usually consisting of thousands of objects) and then bake everything into our low res models. Diffuse, normals, ambient occlusion, shadows, GI, etc... So imagine we have bolts on the high res model, but they are removed in the low res version... we still want the baked texture to have shadows / AO from the high res bolts.

I've tried searching for information regarding the texture bake in V-Ray for Maya, but can't really find anything. I had a demo version (but it ended the other day and I had to send back the dongle) in which I at least managed to render the lighting to a texture, but I couldn't find any settings where I could chose what kind of maps that I wanted to bake...

So, as I said, it can equally be my lack of knowledge in how baking works in Maya as there could be a lack of functionality on V-Ray's behalf. If anyone could explain the baking process for several maps and / or if what I want even is possible, It'd be much appreciated.

[Morbid Angel]

vray in maya has a very good bake engine, though it still could use some work. If you go to Rendering tab in maya UI, under Lighting/Shading, there is bake with vray on the very bottom. This is how you get the baking ui to start. But before that you must create a bake set, to put the objects you want into it so it will bake them. To do that go under Lighting/Shading, assign single bake set options to selection, its a mutual exclusive set, so any objects you add to it will use its attributes. In there you find the options like resolution and output path. Once you are done you can run bake with vray and away it goes. It also supports all the passes which can be enabled in the render elements tab.

One limitation currently that some people complain about is lack of ability to bake multiple objects into one map, as far as I know you would have to combine them before baking if you wish to do that.

[vlado]

For the moment, we don't directly support projection baking in Maya (it can be cheated, but it's not very user-friendly), although it is not too hard to do that and I'll make a note for it. Let me know how urgent this is and we'll look into it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[nbreslow]

This would be a great addition. If you can add it I think people would find it very useful. Thanks,

-Nick

[Undersky]

Thanks, vlado. Well, we do quite a lot of these realtime projects. Right now we don't have any way for us to bake the models without spending more time by applying another set of shaders (to use with TURTLE) and we'd really like to just use the shaders we already have (which in this case would be V-Ray shaders). We're actually starting off two projects in the not too distant future where we'll be doing this, and if it would be possible to solve rather quickly, then it would be an instant buy for us. If it were up to just me we would already have bought it =) But since we're also doing quite a couple of realtime projects, we need a pipeline that works rather effortlessly.

For the moment, we don't directly support projection baking in Maya (it can be cheated, but it's not very user-friendly), although it is not too hard to do that and I'll make a note for it. Let me know how urgent this is and we'll look into it.

Best regards,
Vlado

[vlado]

Ok then; if you can actually get me some examples of a high-poly object with shaders and the low-poly object that you need to bake to vlado@chaosgroup.com, it will be very helpful to make sure we are on the right track. We can obviously do tests with spheres and such, but they might be far off from actual usage scenarios

Best regards,
Vlado

[Undersky]

Ok then; if you can actually get me some examples of a high-poly object with shaders and the low-poly object that you need to bake to vlado@chaosgroup.com, it will be very helpful to make sure we are on the right track. We can obviously do tests with spheres and such, but they might be far off from actual usage scenarios

Best regards,
Vlado

Sounds really good! I'll see if I can get it to you either this week or the next (have to clear it with the customer first, and those things can take time =)

[ultrasonic]

Could it be that you are looking for something like the maya surfaceSampler or as it is called in newer maya builds "Transfer Maps" in the "Lighting/Shading" Menu?

[Undersky]

Could it be that you are looking for something like the maya surfaceSampler or as it is called in newer maya builds "Transfer Maps" in the "Lighting/Shading" Menu?

Probably, but it was my understanding that it didn't work with V-Ray shaders?

[ultrasonic]

Probably, but it was my understanding that it didn't work with V-Ray shaders?

What exact features do you want to transfer to your lowpoly? Most of the information are independent of the renderer in my opinion.

[Undersky]

What exact features do you want to transfer to your lowpoly? Most of the information are independent of the renderer in my opinion.

Details from the high poly, i.e. shadows / textures from bolts and other small details that won't be in the low poly version. Also decals (that we put on as several shaders or textures). So we have one diffuse map with all the decals and shadows / other detail from the smaller geometri. And then combined with a normal map and a baked AO map would be nice aswell.