Does Light/texture Baking Speed Up Renders?

[loganb]

does light/texture baking speed up renders?

i guess I always thought that was the reason, probably because I read about pre-rendering lighting onto textures in video games. but Maya's docs don't mention baking as a way to speed up a render, so I am thinking baking is for some other purpose...

[gmask]

yes it absolutely can speed up rendering.. for exampel ambient occlusion is incredibly slow but if it's baked in as textures ....

[loganb]

well, i decided to give baking a try (never done it before) using lighting/sshading>batch bake (mental ray)

:// Error: (mental ray) : cannot create file E:/....renderData/mentalray/lightMap/baked-blahblah.tif //
// Error: (mental ray) : blahblah.tif: can't create file (The device does not recognize the command.)

also, most of these appear to be using shaders not present in the scene...like
"lambert6SG-nurbsTorus13nurbsTorusShape29.tif:" there's no lambert6SG shader in my scene...altho there is a urbsTorus13nurbsTorusShape29..

[loganb]

Damn its getting to the 11th hour...
is there a way to undo baking?

sure hope so

[gmask]

if you didn't save a file prior to this.... you need to be slapped on the wrist

don't use tif files use iff, tga or sgi

[user_deleted]

also btw you should name your nodes as you go... having things like "lambert6SG-nurbsTorus13nurbsTorusShape29" or "lambert6SG" is great fun when your scenes become gigantic.

[joojaa]

QUOTE(loganb @ 01/26/09, 07:19 PM) [snapback]299645[/snapback]
does light/texture baking speed up renders?

Well thats a huge maybe, if the lightning conditions are static then maybe if you exclude the time it takes to bake. On the otherhand if its not static then it doesnt help much unless you can split this up into layers.

And about thsose missing references. Whanever you move things form one computer to another you eed more than just the ma/mb file you also need all teh references to go with that.

QUOTE
don't use tif files use iff, tga or sgi

Well actually id only use iff, exr, png and a very limited controlled environment tiffs (ie tifs only form persons I KNOW understand that tif is a compound format, or myself, reason is clear as some bit depths a re abit tricky for some maya versions without the tif format)

[loganb]

thanks for your help guys. Our studio generally works on Maya assets received from our clients (who in turn get them from outsourced contractors), so we have to deal with a lot of incomplete scenes missing plugins and textures, and a wide array of render setups, which i generally have to reverse engineer, even tho i am no maya guru by any stretch. even tho 30% of what i am told goes right over my head, This forum has been invaluable to me for solving these problems, so i really appreciate it.

I think i was able to "un-bake" by exporting the geometry and re-importing...but maybe I'm wrong (been a long week, brain fried)

[gmask]

QUOTE(loganb @ 01/27/09, 11:36 AM) [snapback]299737[/snapback]
I think i was able to "un-bake" by exporting the geometry and re-importing...but maybe I'm wrong (been a long week, brain fried)

no.. if the "baked" shaders are applied then you'll be exporting the geometry with the baked shaders. The original shaders remain in the scene but their connections get broken although I suppose you ran the bake while in a rende rlayer it might preserve the original connections.. haven't tried it though.