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View Full Version : Baked lightmap -> all normals hard

Marcel
03-27-2005, 11:50 AM
I'm using the 'mental ray Batch Bake' function to bake the occlusion of a mesh. All the normals that are smooth turn out to be hard in the baked texture. Does anybody know how to change this, so that soft normals are also soft in the baked texture?

In the render the normals work fine, and when I bake the light from a spotlight then they also work, so I guess it's something silly from Mental Ray?
BillSpradlin
03-27-2005, 08:44 PM
Since baking goes off of the vert information, you can circumvent this by smoothing the geometry prior to baking to have more verts to bake to. You can then use the smoothed baked information on your low res geometry. It's a little more set up, but works well.
Marcel
03-28-2005, 12:11 PM
Thanks for your reply Bill,

This is indeed what I normally do with characters, but right now I have to bake the occlusion of a vehicle. Since it's all sharp edged the smoothing alters the geometry too much. :(
BillSpradlin
03-31-2005, 04:14 AM
Sorry I missed your reply, but an alternitive sollution to smoothing is to select all of the faces and run the Subdivide tool. This will basically do just that, subdivide the faces into more faces keeping your exact shape. Whereas smoothing interprolates an output based off of an algorithm that averages vert information. You could even subdivide a few times, and then smooth if you so desired.
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03-31-2005, 04:14 AM
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