I will keep the first question simple and ask more based on anyone's response.
Can you bake both FG and GI lighting with Maya4.5 and MR1.5beta?
Currently, I get very strange results baking lights with FG and GI turned on. Turing off FG solves my problems. However, I can't believe this limitation exists.
Thanks
I may be entirely wrong, but isnt there a video on this at www.aliaswavefront.com under demos or something?
I may be wrong..hehe
There is no video concerning using the two in combination or speaking to the quality of output. The baking illumination video mentions only Global illumination.
I believe this can be done, since it can be done with XSI and MR. However, I get a good number of artifacts when I use GI and FG together.
Are other people experiencing any problems with this?
Is anyone baking GI and FG together with solid results?
thanks
I ran into the same problem today, and diged out this post.
I wonder if the original poster have found any solution to this problem by now.
I was using FG without GI and was planning to bake the lighting but now I'm a bit scared. I asumed at first it will be a simple solution according to the video. huh ...
Oh, yes i have the same problem.
But in my case, I need to bake shadows(and light) in the textures (like for a game)
But, textures not created correctly.
After many hours of testign different settings and reading help files I realizes that the settings in the render globals for final gather had the final word over my baked textures. The values for min and max radius that were good for the final render were bad for the baking. Having the min and max values much smaller started to give better results but the rendering time went sky up. The results for the lowest valus that I was able to wait for were still not acceptable without blurring the textures in photoshop later.
I think at this point I'll just give up until some fresh ideas jump in.
Well if you are baking then it can take a bit longer... so what if its a 1000 frame animation and it takes 4 times longer its still a very good optimization (about 250 time faster, or well not quite some of the data may be reused)!
Since someone had asked, I still have not found a solution.
If anyone has been able to convert final gathering to textures with clean results, please put up a message.
Even if you don't feel like giving details, at least other folks will know it can be done.
Thanks
Tom
Yes, it can be done. Once you have a good solution to the FG
in a final render, (which includes lowering the Difffuse setting on the shader(s) to about .3) the texture will bake out as it appears in the render, even with multiple shaders (including stencils) on the geometry.
This problem has poped up on every mental ray discussion group. But the answer rarely does.
When using Final Gathering to bake lighting, one often gets large blobby shapes instead of smooth gradients.
It turns out that Mental Ray automatically calculates some settings for Final Gathering when you render, and these settings are based on scenes size.
Specifically it controls how many final gather sample points are created.
When you bake lighting, however, it never does this auto setting, so you have to do it manually. These are called "final gathering sample radius" or something similar. The default zero means to automatically calculate it.
The number you need depends on the size of your scene. Try rediculous numbers if you have too.
please, please can you give us some more info.
I have a simple scene set up with a dome, ground plane,cube and 1 light. when I bake GI it works perfectly but when I turn on FG the lightmaps have odd artifacts in them. the render of the the GI and FG before baking looks fine, and I have my diffuse values at around 0.3.
I would very much appreciate any tips.
Thanks
Sure. The setting you need is called "final gathering radius". It's in the MR render globals.
If you leave it at the default of zero and do a frame render, everything looks fine. This is because 0 tells it to calculate a good number by itself. And it makes a good guess.
But when you do a bake render, it does a horible job of picking a radius.
The artifact you are seeing is the result of MR deciding that it doesn't have to do too many FG calculations. Each "blob" is a single calculation. Thus your render is nice and fast, but not what you want.
So go back to doing frame renders, and adjust that radius number. Larger numbers mean further between FG caclulations. Smaller numbers look better, but take longer.
When you go to do a bake, for some reason the numbers that worked for a full frame render don't work anymore. I find that they have to be around 1/5 of what they were.
For my stuff, I'm using min .04 and max 2 for burning.
But this is completely dependent on the scale of what you are burining, and the detail you need in your render map.
Hope this helps