Baking HDR environemnts from render

[sharktacos]

Is there a way to take a scene with lots of complex geo, and bake that onto simplified geometry? For example a bookshelf with hundreds of book models, all baked on to a simple cube?

[yolov]

You can use projection texture baking with V-Ray bake option sets. It would allow you to project a bookshelf onto a plane for example. Not sure how well it will work in your case, but it just might.
Usage:
Assign a vray bake set to a plane (either from the vray shelf or from lighting/shading menu > assign single vray bake options).
Intersect the plane with the bookshelf, since vray will trace projections along the plane's normals.
In the plane's bake options, go to the projection baking rollout and enable target set - add the objects you wish to project. Set mode to "closest".
Then again in lighting/shading open the vray bake options and set: Objects = All, Skip =true, assign textures = true (auto assigns the baked texture), output = <path>, projection baking = true.

Here's an example scene: bake.zip

[sharktacos]

Cool, thanks very much, I'll give that a try

[Zdravko.Keremidchiev]

Another approach you can do is to offset the plane and use Outside Geometry mode http://ftp.chaosgroup.com/support/shelf_01.ma

[sharktacos]

So I gave this a try. Setting Objects = All, Skip =true meant that it went through all of the objects (there were hundreds in my scene), translating them to geo, and then skipping them. This took quite a while, so my first question is whether there is a way to not need to do this?

When it finally got to baking all that on to the single simple geo, it opened the VFB, then crashed Maya. So that was not great. Any tips there?

[yolov]

For some reason it only worked with those settings when I first tried it, but it turns out it could be made easier. Set objects to bake to "selected", then select your simple geo and hit "bake". (you can keep "skip objects with no bake set" enabled in case you select something you don't want to bake).

[Kakashi]

Is there a way to projection texture baking on the command line rendering?

[yolov]

The option is only available from the GUI, it's not even in the render settings, so that's a "no".