Surface Baking Bump channel?

[Warchyld]

Hi.

I would like to use the surface baker plugin to bake my bump channel instead of my color channel. Not the result of the bump map on my model, but rather the image used to create the results.

Currently I am copying the bump channel and moving it to the color channel, and then baking. This is a pain, and does not work very well.

Any ideas?

[toby]

In what way doesn't it work well?

You could try putting a gradient set to "bump" in the color channel. Then any changes you make in the bump will update in the color channel automatically.

[Sekhar]

Just curious: If you have your bump channel set up, what's the benefit of baking it to an image and then using that image for bump (if that's what you're doing)? I can only guess you're flattening a bunch of layers with procedurals, etc. into a single image, but why?

The main advantage of baking is that it lets you reduce rendering by creating a baked texture to use rather than keep re-rendering (like say with an animation of a wall with constant lighting).

[Warchyld]

I use lightwave for game development. I need a single texture for my in-game bump maps.