Optimised Texture Baking

[chris2307]

Hi all,

I am attempting to bake textures in to my scene so that I am able to run a scene with realistic looking shadows and lighting. I have a large floor (Approx 100m by 100m) and this is causing my huge problems.

I have spent a lot of time in 3DS Max preparing the model to bake in the texture. Unfortunately, when I come to bake the floor, anything less than 2048x2048 pixels is not good enough. When I run the application in Vizard, I get some terrible "juddering" from the camera as I move, presumably because I am drawing such a large texture.

I have broken the floor up in to smaller parts but as the floor is circular in shape, I get a lot of wasted space in my UV maps.

Can anyone suggest a more efficient way? I am worried already because my scene is reasonably detailed and the floor is the first thing I have attempted to bake and run so far.

Thanks

[chris2307]

To further elaborate on my question (Sorry the original question was maybe a bit sparse .I was a bit tired at the time of writing this!):

1. I have rendered out lightmaps so I am able to use the original texture for my floor, whilst maintaining a good resolution for shadows. This works a lot better. However, I lose the colour of the lighting I created in 3DS Max, which I guess is to be expected as the lightmap is only used to calculate the brightness of the texture. Is there a way to add a subtle colour to the entire scene in order to mimic this? If not available to do in Vizard, could I write this as a shader instead?

2. I've also been reading around the subject and see that a drawback of baking complete textures is that it's difficult to do with large scenes. Has anyone else worked with large, realistic looking scenes in Vizard and tackled a similar problem? I seem to be having a catch 22 moment.

3. I was thinking about writing a shader which works out lighting and shadows for me but I have never used OpenGL before or written a shader (I am originally from the DX camp). Would this realistically be my best bet though?

Thanks

[Jeff]

1. Take a look at the color effects in the post-process library

2. I'll check to see if one of our artists has suggestions about this.

[chris2307]

Thank you very much! :-)

As for the post-process library, I will take a look now and let you know how I get on.

[Riverol]

In regards to a large floor, there's not many more options than breaking up. I would also see what I can do with the bake map in photoshop. One cheat, might be to render the 2048X2048 size. Open it up in photoshop, reduce down the size and blur it slightly. This might muddy bake but it's worth trying.

You should be able to maintain the color of the light when baking a lightmap. What sort of lighting method are you going with? Have you tried exxagerating the light's color to see if it works? I've run a couple of test bakes and they all seem to keep the lights color.

https://www.dropbox.com/s/s30g6si9h9ahdxi/lighttest.jpg

You can see here that I took a piece of grey geometry, took. 3 different lights, baked and exported.

Complete maps are usually good for objects or scenes with details (solid white walls, etc). It's not ideal with large scenes either. If you're working with textures that have a lot of details (wood grains, lettering, metals) you're better off using lightmaps.

[chris2307]

Thanks a lot for the reply!

It's reassuring to hear that baking a light map will maintain the colour. What was happening for me was, when using the light map, I was seeing an increased brightness and shadows at various points along the floor which I expected but the nice warm effect given by the yellow tinged lighting was not as obvious (it was in 3DS). Perhaps it is my eye-sight! I will exaggerate the colour of the light further and see if this helps. If not, I shall attach screen-shots here and explain my process in more detail.

Thanks for the photoshop cheat. I will give this a go and see what kind of results I get as well.

I will try the tips you suggested and update the thread at some point in the next few days. Hopefully, I will get the desired results and be able to post my methods for other people to use! Watch this space