Testing V-Ray bake for light maps

[BusinessIQ]

Can you please avail a demo scene so we can learn from the various settings. I am slightly confused by the V-ray blueprints and Native Unreal Lights. How should one ideally setup a project for Realtime Rendering with baked shadow maps?

Using V-ray bake on a 3rds person template project make the whole scene dark (underexposed).

Is v-ray bake only light mass calculation or is it something else as well?

[BusinessIQ]

Vray Version 4.02.04
Unreal Version 4.203

Light bake apparently requires v-ray materials yet the documentation doesn’t say anything about this. Baking a scene with native UE4 materials will darken the whole scene and there is no shadow information. Strangely enough the native materials are only support for rendering an image.

I could have saved hours of testing if only someone from the team could have pointed this simple point out.

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, BusinessIQ

Thanks for the feedback!
Light baking does not only require V-Ray materials. Native Unreal materials can be baked as well. If you are having strange results and weir artifacts maybe there are some expressions in the materials that are not supported and/or you are rendering/baking with CPU, which currently does not support native materials. For example this shader ball has a native layered material applied and baked with GPU only.



If that is not the case, send some screenshots of the materials you are using and your V-Ray settings and/or a sample scene where this is reproduceable. Maybe this is a bug that we have to fix.

Best regards,
Alexander

[BusinessIQ]

Thanks for the clarification. I think the issue is more related to missing texture source file path for Substance Source Materials generated from the UE4 Plugin.

The issue is reported here:
https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...als-with-v-ray

Can you please clarify the following:
1) VRayPBRMtl vs. VRayMtl. Is there any quality difference in terms of lightmap baking?
2) Can vrscan materials be used with “render from .vrscene" option? If yes, would this improve the lightmap quality?

Trying to get the most photorealistic lightmaps for VR simulations.

[Alexander.Atanasov]

Hi, BusinessIQ

I already answered to your post about substance, you can go and check it out: https://forums.chaosgroup.com/forum/...als-with-v-ray

Can you please clarify the following:
1) VRayPBRMtl vs. VRayMtl. Is there any quality difference in terms of lightmap baking?
2) Can vrscan materials be used with “render from .vrscene" option? If yes, would this improve the lightmap quality?

Regarding lightmaps quality there isn't much difference in the type of material you are using. Since lightmaps are mainly derived from GI and Direct lighting, the quality of the materials and textures used is not that of an issue. The quality of the materials such as VRScans are best for image rendering.

Best regards,
Alexander