Baking surfaces

[fabmedia]

Why would you bake a surface for a model? How does it decrease the render time, and do you need to bake for a particular scene?

Boy that's a lot.

Arlen

[jeremyhardin]

usually to capture lighting detail to a texture (rather than calculating it every frame)

if you're using radiosity, you could bake that to your model, that way you don't have the radiosity render time, other than that one frame.

[fabmedia]

So what would you not bake for rendering a scene and is bakiing the standard for rendering scene files for film/TV?

A

[richpr]

The example used in Inside Lightwave 7 is for a fly-through animation of for instance a building... Instead having to render all the frames with radiosity... you bake the surfaces in 1 radiosity render... apply to objects and render the animation without radiosity, which will look like radiosity is used but renders much, much faster...

That's how I understand it... ;) Read the chapter two days ago...

[fabmedia]

Do you know which page it is on? I can't seem to find any reference to it.

A

[richpr]

Chapter 9, 416-422

[fabmedia]

Bugger!!! Not the same page numbers as I have. I just noticed that you mentioned 7. I have 7.5. I guess I'm out of luch. Read read read....

Thanks!

A

[richpr]

If you don't have the "Inside Lightwave 7" book, you could try the Shaders section in the Lightwave HTML Help... search for Surface Baker

[flagfranca]

I did follow the instructions on Dan Ablan´s book and tried to bake some surfaces. With the standard configurations he suggests, when creating an Atlas UV Map in modeler, all the baked surfaces ends with an unnaceptable look, looking like extremely low-res blurred images (even when considering the value "800", that he indicates as a good value).

Until now, I believe Ablan´s vision, on this specific topic of the book, is extremely superficial. He didn´t tell us the whole story on surface baking. There´s a tutorial on Newtek´s page, written by an italian guy, that open our eyes to more deep issues on surface baking, including geometry related facts involved. Unfortunattely, I discovered that surface baking is not a so easy question. Dear Dan, "Baking is not so cool! "....until we have enough information to master it. ;)

[RobinWood]

In my manual, the pages concerning Surface Baking are 31.70-31.78. (I have LW 7.5.)

However, I agree that you usually get more information by looking at the Lightwave HTML Help (http://www.newtek.com/freestuff/lwhelp/). At least, I usually find that to be the case.

I've never done this myself (I don't do animations, so there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of point to baking the surfaces,) so I can't comment on the actual process.

[Simon]

Baking the illumination is a great idea in theory, but for me the drawbacks with Surface Baker are:
Doesn't work with multi-threading
Very very slooooow unless the uv maps are small and simple
Doesn't work with polys with more than 4 sides