Bake texture and scenes with many objects?

[dickagm]

hi all gurus
I have a situation here,
very big scene: a bridge with 600 shadow mapped and one raytraced lights and more than 1000 objects. I decided to lite and texture only 1/10 part of the bridge to bake its textures and when baked to duplicate this part 4 times in front and 4 parts in back from the source.
Now the problem...
1. Is there some way to do the bake in batch mode?
2. I think that normaly the bake operation recalculates the lighting every time for every object.. my scene is 250 frames long if I need to recalculate the lighting 1000 times for all objects to have individual and detailed texture for every one object, I will loose more time than the actual render.
Is there some hiden tricks in maya "convert to file texture" to do the lighting onece and bake all the textures and objects with it? not one by one.
I'll be ultra happy for any suggestions ) my end line is close
10x in advance
be3D;)

[gmask]

Well first of all are you using the Maya render or MR? Are you models poly or Nurbs? IF they are poly then I would suggest that you combine the poly objects .. that way to bake will happen on one large object rather than lots of small ones. Plus it will speedup things with MR for it to work with fewser objects even if they are larger objects.

[dickagm]

I'm trying to bake with maya render, the objects are polygons but if I combine them into one large object the size of baked texture will be not big enough for the detail that I need.
the "road" object (plane), must be baked in 8192x1024 to look corectly but in this res can be baked on linux or unix platform and I then must separate my object to 2 parts to have corect detail, but can these 2 parts be baked at once.
Can I bake combined polygonal object that have 2 diferent shaders applayed?
Why the raytrced shadows do not appear in baked texture? I read in the posts that for baking lighting and shadows must be selected Shadeing Group not the shader only. is it true.
is there Guide on the Internet for bakeing textures, lights and shadows in maya or MR for maya?

10x for replay

[gmask]

I don't think you can bake raytraced shadows.. although you could perhaps raytrace a shadow map from the lights point of view and then use a camera projection to map the result to the surface.

Look up bakesets in teh Maya docs as they can let you add several objects to the same bake process and have the resutls applied seperately

I would still combine any small objects like bolts and girders etc.. large pieces like road don;t ahve to be combined.

check out learningmaya.com for possible tutorials