Vray Bake Object - Is it possible to bake normals, metalness, or glossiness maps?

V-Ray V-Ray for Cinema 4D General
1

Hi Chaos,

I am looking into using Vray to create some game engine ready assets now that vray 6 has the bake object tool. However, i can’t seem to find a way to bake additional maps like metalness, glossiness, or normals. Is this possible in the current version? If not, is it on the roadmap to output these types of maps?

One other thing, the alpha output does not seem correct either, it is showing alphas on materials that do not have any transparency.

Thanks in advance!

2

Hey,

Thanks for the report,

One other thing, the alpha output does not seem correct either, it is showing alphas on materials that do not have any transparency.
​
Could please be more specific about alpha map? If you provide me a scene file will be great.
Cheers,

3

Hello @zAppledot ,

The baked textures are determined by the Render Elements in the scene. For example, to have a Reflection Glossiness map you would need a Reflection Glossiness Render Element. Then go to V-Ray > Tools > V-Ray Bake Options to finalize the process. Feel free to take a look at our Documentation here.

We currently do not have Metalness Render Element (the feature request has been logged in our system VC4d-1740).

4

Hi Boyan,

Not a problem, i have tested more, and it appears that textures in the reflection channel are affecting the alpha. Here is a simple scene with a cube, I grabbed a random texture to put in the reflection channel just to demonstrate the issue.

Screenshot 2023-03-13 at 10.18.55 AM.jpg
Screenshot 2023-03-13 at 10.18.55 AM.jpg1516×1404 136 KB
​​
Screenshot 2023-03-13 at 10.28.42 AM.png
Screenshot 2023-03-13 at 10.28.42 AM.png766×310 54.2 KB

You can see the baked alpha results, when the object should not have any alpha.

​

1_Cube.Alpha.jpg
1_Cube.Alpha.jpg512×512 17.4 KB
​

Scene file attached.

Thanks!
BakedAlpha.zip (678 KB)

5

Hi Viktor,

Thanks for the tip, that is what i was looking for. :slight_smile:
I had read the documentation on the baked object tool, but unfortunately did not find any references to the render elements or additional baked elements. (Unless i totally missed it, you may want to add a note about it to the documentation)

Thanks again!

6

Hello @zAppledot ,

Thank you! We have that in mind and we are working on it.

7

Question that is somewhat related to the original topic. Is it possible to see have the bake render output to the picture viewer or vfb during the render process? It would be good to preview render quality/resolution before the bake is complete.

8

Hello @zAppledot ,

Currently, the baking progress cannot be previewed in the VFB or the picture viewer. I have logged such a request in our system (request ID: VC4D-1755) and I will keep you updated on its progress. Thank you.

9

Hello @zAppledot ,

As you might have already seen in the Announcement post, we just released V-Ray 6 for Cinema 4D Update 1. It comes with many new features and I am happy to let you know that we have now added the Metalness Render element. More information about it can be found here. You can download and install the latest builds from here.