Hey, guys. I was just wondering if normal baking is possible on the GPU? I can’t seem to be able to bake some hi-poly geometry to a plane to name the normals.NVIDIA On-Demand
I found that and it mentions normal baking, so maybe I’m missing something?
Also, for displacement baking, what would the correct procedure be? My understanding is to use VRay-specific output maps for baking and not standard Max like height. Is that correct?
Thank you.
Hello logan683,
Baking on the GPU is only available through the Production renderer and should work just as standard CPU baking works.
To enable it you have to go to your Render Setup → Common tab and assing V-Ray RT as Production renderer.
By default the CPU is used as RT renderer, so you will also have to go to V-Ray RT tab in Render Setup and change the Engine Type accordingly.
Note that if you are rendering displaced objects you will also have to make sure that the Displacement check box is ticked in the Render Setup->V-Ray RT-> Global Switches menu.
Also, since displaced objects rendered on the GPU are tessellated at the start of a frame and stored on the GPU as regular meshes, make sure that your GPU has enough memory to store the resulting mesh.
Because of this limitation you may not be able to render extremely large displaced meshes on the GPU.
I hope I have made things a little bit clearer.
Alexander.
Thank you for the reply. My problem isn’t that I don’t know how to bake, it’s that I can’t get it to bake on GPU. At all. Here are two screenshots, one using GPU, which shows only the plane without the baked geometry, as the corresponding normal map, which is included shows. As you can see from the CPU bake, the geometry is there, as the normal map shows. I realize they’re not the highest quality, it was only a few minutes rendering to get the point across.
Thank you for the time, Alexander.
GPU Bake:
CPU Bake:
P.S. Just to clarify, can I use the Height output with VRay to bake displacement? I ask because when I try, Max crashes. Again, thank you for your time and attention to this matter.
Hello Logan,
I misunderstood your question the first time. Sorry about that. Thank you for the information and the screenshots provided. They were most helpful.
I see you are trying to use projection baking, but unfortunately that feature is not supported on the GPU yet.
The GPU currently supports only standard texture baking.
As for the second part of your question, you are correct. The internal 3ds Max render elements are not supported, so outputs like the HeightMap do not work with V-Ray.
You can use all of the V-Ray specific render elements, though.
Alexander.
Thank you for clarifying. It was my mistake not mentioning I was projection baking and I apologize for that.
Thank you for clearing the matter up. Can I go ahead and request projection mapping on the GPU? If so, then I am requesting it.
Again, thank you for your help and for everything you do to make the best renderer.
Alexander.
I know this is probably a total n00b question, but I’m not sure the way to do it. What VRay specific output should be used for displacement?
Thank you.
Hi,
Would it be possible to provide more information on this request ? What type of displacement maps you need to create or bake ?
We have a material V-Ray Vector DisplBake which can be useful in your case.
