Baking to a texture sequence?

[nlong]

Hi guys I have a 60 frame animation and thought i would bake out the light information of each frame and then bring in the sequence of baked images back to the shader of my model so that it will have the animation of the lighting baked in the texture. I dont know how to bake out more than one frame at a time though without having to do it manually. Is there a setting in Maya where i can choose a range of frames to bake out so i can bring them back in as a sequence???

[nlong]

no one has any ideas??

[joojaa]

Bake with keep original shading network setting. Then make a for loop that steps trough time and sets the basename post or prefixed with frame number, and initiate batch bake from mel at the end of the for loop.

[nlong]

thanks joojaa. yea i figured as much, ive concocted a script that renders out the sequence but i havent worked in the "for" loop in there cus i need to learn more about the mel commands. so for now it is working but when i get to start rendering hundreds and thousands of renders i need to get this thing looping. thanks for the response!

[mandrak]

What's the point of this method? I miserably fail to see any advantage in it.

[nlong]

well if you are using final gather or something like that as a renedering option then baking (at least a still) to the object you can get the final gather look but it would be all baked in to the texture so you can then get your software or hardware renderer and render out an image that looks really nice in seconds. so i wanted to test how a final gathered animation would look if you bake out a sequence of these baked maps. im curious if that would work.

[joojaa]

Ummm but the baking would take hours uppon hours, infact baking is significantly slower than rendering form one camera with fg on. And youd be no closer to flicker free renders, infact youd probably be rendering longer for wrrse quality stuff.

Tough i CAN see some use for this. Imagine its a animation of something youd use a LOT then you could animate the lights only to simulate a 256 different lighning shemes, and because light is additive you could prettymuch simulate many more by combining the resulst so NOW whan you need the sequance youd allways be able to put different lightning on it easily and quickly. BUt theres not much use fro this unless its going to be a game, or its a tv show where the same quite static thing is shown regularyy in different contexts in 100 of several min shots every single episode.

[mandrak]

That was exactly what I was thinking. It's only use would be for some real time engine. But - I can't see how could this method deliver flicker-free solution in acceptable render times?

[nlong]

hm very true guys, i guess it being new to me i wanted to test it out and see what sort of things i can do with it.........also what do you guys think of baking out an occlusion pass sequence. or would it be better to just render out the pass in a regular manner?