Baked textures

[Paraglobal]

Hello all

I'm looking to lern more about baked textures, can someone please share more information on what is this exactelly?
maybe some wite papers explaining it?

My idea is that is a tecknique the render something and then use the result to create a texture, correct?

Can rhino do this with any of the new render engines?

Regards
Sergio

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Baked textures

I'll add to what was said on the newsgroup with a few comments here. Texture baking is essentially doing a render, but rather then rendering for an image, the render is done for texturing (hence the reason it is some times called render to texture). This means that pretty much all of diffuse information (the lighting of a scene, shadows, color bleeding, and multiple layers) will be "embedded" or "baked" within the texture of object.

The main use for this is actually within the gaming industry. A lot of the "realism" that is achieved today is not all calculated in realtime, but rather its just the information of the texture that has the realism baked in. This means that you can actually get very "real" looking results from pretty much any realtime engine (including Rhino's) by simply having baked textures on the model. This means that texture baking is great for doing realtime presentations. Combine that with some of the real time reflections that Rhino already has and you can get something that is pretty convincing (this is something they McNeel guys were actually showing in London in 06).

This can also greatly speed up a regular rendering, but it will require a modified setup to work with the baked textures. Sometimes, baking textures is used to speed up complex animations.

On to the other end of texture baking. From what I've found, its a process that will take longer than a regular render. Think about the length of time that a good quality render takes at a fair resolution...so for 1024x1024 you're looking at any where from half an hour to maybe 2. For texture baking, you've got to calculate every surface in the scene at a fairly good resolution which, in terms of pixels, is usually a good deal more then just a standard image.

The other thing about texture baking is that I'm not sure how that will work with nurbs. With meshes you can do a UV unwrap and that will become the "template" for creating the baked map. With nurbs, each surface has its own UV space, so I'm just not sure how the baked texture would be applied to a polysurface.

Here's a tutorial from Spot3d. It might be good to take a look at, although it is for Max.
http://www.spot3d.com/vray/help/150R...king_part1.htm

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: Baked textures

I wish someone had a good uvmapper for polysurfaces. It would make my life sooo much easier. :'(

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Baked textures

This one is a start...Clement posted it yesterday on the newsgroup...I haven't gotten a chance to play around with it yet.

http://news2.mcneel.com/scripts/dnew...=Prev.+message

[Micha_cg]

Re: Baked textures

... or www.uvmapper.com

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: Baked textures

micha uvmapper doesnt work with nurbs polysurfaces does it?

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: Baked textures

This one is a start...Clement posted it yesterday on the newsgroup...I haven't gotten a chance to play around with it yet.

http://news2.mcneel.com/scripts/dnew...=Prev.+message

very very interesting! I'll check this out for sure!

[Micha_cg]

Re: Baked textures

micha uvmapper doesnt work with nurbs polysurfaces does it?

Right, I only know mesh uvmapper.

[dalomar_cg]

Re: Baked textures

well AFAIK clement's tool works on polysurfaces indirectly. IOW it will use the polysurface as an input to generate the mapping (ie you don't have to convert to meshes first), but it is using the rendermesh from that object to generate the mapping. So if you change rendermesh settings you may have to recompute the map. I still need to try this one out though, so I'll get back to you on it later this week (hopefully).

[Travis Serio_cg]

Re: Baked textures

set density to 1 and everything else to zero

enable refine mesh =)