Poor results from Bake Vertex Colors

[rainingwaffles]

In testing the bake for vertex colors through V-Ray I used this forum post as reference: Bake to vertex color set - General - Chaos Forum

Although the process somewhat “works” it’s very noisy with regular lighting and unclear how to improve quality. The process does very well with a point light with zero radius. For area lights or any light source with larger area it seems to get it right when things are either completely visible to the light or completely blocked but very poorly when it’s in a shade of gray. Shadow bias, sampling, and other things I tweaked didn’t seem to make a difference.

What quality knobs in V-Ray can be used to improve the vertex bake quality? Scene attached, along with sample images. Thanks,

Blake

vertex_color_bake_v0001.zip (1.11 MB)

[rainingwaffles]

Seems like this is totally sample related: running vertex bakes on multiple frames and averaging them together starts to give a smoother result. Are any of the quality parameters honored for vertex baking a single frame?

vertex_color_bake_v0001.average.zip (5.68 MB)

[rainingwaffles]

Ah, okay, figured it out: turning on “VRay > DMC sampler > Use local subdivs” and cranking the samples in the lights themselves worked. Here’s the result of vertex baking with the cranked light samples (used 128 for the area light in this test). Hopefully this post helps other avoid this landmine.

[tmcthree]

Thanks this fixed it for me. You’re my new favourite person.