Baking Lighting with MEL or command line

[jamiebmarshall]

Does anyone know how I can bake Mental Ray lightmaps with either MEL or the command line?

Obviously there is the interface in the Hypershader, but the spew that shows up when I run it isn't very helpfull in tracking down the MEL I need.

I'm trying to set up a large scale render farm for baking light maps. My intention is to call maya from the command line and trigger a script that will render lightmaps for a given file.

Alternatively I would be happy to call "mayarender_with_MR" from the command line, if I knew how to make that output light maps.

Any help?

[jamiebmarshall]

Support just came through with the answer "convertLightmap".

"help convertLighmap" shows the arguments.

-Jamie

[user_deleted]

on another note I had some trouble with Mray light baking, maybe you know this.

Last time I did light map with equally distance placed lights such as those GI faking light scripts with 64 light on top placed in a circular fashion. the results turned out one side of the object had darker color in the resulted light map. any idea?

I believe this light mapping process is view independent, correct?

[jamiebmarshall]

There are two faces for every surface. Front and back. MR doesn't know which one you want to burn light for, so there is an option.

This is "normal direction" You can do front, back, or "face camera".

If you have "face camera" selected, then faces on the back side of your sphere will render on their reverse direction, IE the inside of the sphere. Probably you have shadows on, and so you get black.