Baking AO on a large scene

[selfmadepixels]

is it possible to bake the AO on this house? it's made of hundreds of objects, all with different textures, mapping, etc.

Hi, this is the first obstacle since u have two ways of baking in C4D.
- Baking a single object
- Baking textures from materials
So can imagine what it means to bake every single object or every single material...but i think that baking single textures leads almost all the times to better results and to better control...it's underlined that u have to prepare every material and render it as is before to gain the baked texture u will use in the final animation.
Baking object goes unless u have a single object and not a null with the others in hierarchy...

i am thinking it might be best to make a copy of the file, and in the new file change everything so it has the same texture. pure white in the luminance channel.
then i could maybe bake the whole object fairly easily? and animate this and then composite the result with the standard rendering?
sound like a plan?

The problem remains the number of the separate objects to handle...unless you Connect them in a huge mesh which can be baked....but this process can lead to distortions and loss of mapping coordinates and infos...u can try to lower tha AO settings to something decent and post-produce an eventual multipass file sequence.
Bye

[tonare]

Interesting.
I know how to bake, but I never found out what the advantages of doing this is(except for baking particles).

[selfmadepixels]

Interesting.
I know how to bake, but I never found out what the advantages of doing this is(except for baking particles).

Mainly always the same...gaining time with a good render quality.
U can build complex shaders and fix all the properties on one, or plus of course, complex maps but just in one channel...so, if u have Color, Diffuse, Reflection and Bump for example u can "impress" them on a single bitmap...and place it in one channel.
bye

[tonare]

Mainly always the same...gaining time with a good render quality.
U can build complex shaders and fix all the properties on one, or plus of course, complex maps but just in one channel...so, if u have Color, Diffuse, Reflection and Bump for example u can "impress" them on a single bitmap...and place it in one channel.
bye

Thanks man,

So bump will come out on one material channel after its been baked?
Even if it's just in colors?

I do have a 3d fluff dvd, and it has baking on it, but I dont remember if it covers this.
I'll check it out later.

[TimC]

Thanks man,

So bump will come out on one material channel after its been baked?
Even if it's just in colors?

I do have a 3d fluff dvd, and it has baking on it, but I dont remember if it covers this.
I'll check it out later.

This kind of baking will work for stills mostly, or very simple animation (slight camera moves). You bake all your channels and combine them into a single bitmap. Then just place it in the luminance channel.

A more practical use would be to bake each material channel seperately. Then apply each baked bitmap to the appropriate channel. Then instead of calculating procedural shaders and textures, cinema uses the saved bitmaps for your bump, colour, normal etc channel.

Tim

[selfmadepixels]

A more practical use would be to bake each material channel seperately. Then apply each baked bitmap to the appropriate channel. Then instead of calculating procedural shaders and textures, cinema uses the saved bitmaps for your bump, colour, normal etc channel.

Tim

You're right Tim...:thumbsup:
I was just explaining the straight method for someone who've never used this technique....maybe i'll put down a little tut...hope to have time!
bye

[sketchbook]

thanks for the thoughts.

so AO is a little different than most things in that the object will react to other objects around it. that being the case, if i bake an object with AO, is it going to notice the objects around it when doing the baking?

[JamesMK]

that being the case, if i bake an object with AO, is it going to notice the objects around it when doing the baking?
That happens automagically with all objects that are visible in render.

[Byla]

thanks for the thoughts.

so AO is a little different than most things in that the object will react to other objects around it. that being the case, if i bake an object with AO, is it going to notice the objects around it when doing the baking?

well after you baked and if you use that, AO of course wont be on and animation that involves objects closing in on each other, wont work.

prior to that, that is baking, will take the position into consideration of course.

[nutriman]

The problem remains the number of the separate objects to handle...unless you Connect them in a huge mesh which can be baked....but this process can lead to distortions and loss of mapping coordinates and infos...u can try to lower tha AO settings to something decent and post-produce an eventual multipass file sequence.
Bye

that brought me to an idea which might save you some time setting up, rendering might take longer though but if you work interleavingly it could be still a timesaver:

Render out your animation without AO,
then connect everything to one single object with one material, bake AO (in the luminance channel so no shading appears) and render out the animation as AO pass, put it together in post with the AO pass multiplied.

[sketchbook]

right.

so i just connected the entire structure (after i deleted all the materials) and then baked the AO. It too forever (a couple days), and it just finished. looks like crud. yikes. must have done something wrong. i am going to run some small tests on some smaller files and get it worked out.

thanks

[heathivan]

. . .It too forever (a couple days), and it just finished. looks like crud. yikes.
Here's an old thread on AO baking. I never got it to work either.
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=47&t=377001&highlight=baking

[wesware]

I might be wrong here but I'm pretty sure you have to set up the uv's to not be overlapping when you bake a texture (AO, normals, luminance, whatever) Otherwise you get a mess.

I don't think it's a select all and bake into a useable texture thing-a-ma-bob.

[laurent]

frankly, for me, when I have to animate architectural stills, I remove the AO and just use GI. it is much faster and less troublesome. of course I don't have a pure GI setup, I use it just to get indirect lighting and some bleed so I can get away with low and fast settings (1 bounce is very fast) without flicker, AO looks great but is so slow to render and the process to bake is time consuming with often strange results.

[milesbaskett]

WesWare is right. If you don't UV map your objects properly, you will get unwanted results or problems. I use baked textures all the time( game modeling, animating) and never experience problems. But, I UV map every object in BP as I create it. Using the UV wizard is not an option, you must do the UV's by hand or the reulting textures that are baked out will suck. If you are not too familiar with using BP, baking will be a excercise in patience. Plus, baking is not a new feature( out sence rel7.303), yet not many people know how to use it right because they don't know how to use BP, which from my experience is a requirement.

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.