Bake AO to Vertex Map

[ThePriest]

I'm just getting 100% selection where as I hoped for a nice
balanced Red/Yellow selection.

http://www.priest3d.com/cgtalk/vm.jpg

[JoelOtron]

Hmm--there used to be a bake to vertex map option right in the dirtynuts/dirt settings--but donet see it in the bake options.

What you could do is bake the AO to a bmp first--then if you still need to use the ao via the vertex map shader, you can use ditools "texture to vertex map" tag to create a map from the bitmap.

[JoelOtron]

Well--this method kind of defeats the purpose of quickly generating a vertex map--but below are examples of the bitmap ao map and the vertex map ao map.

[Simon Wicker]

[QUOTE=JoelD]Hmm--there used to be a bake to vertex map option right in the dirtynuts/dirt settings--but donet see it in the bake options.[QUOTE]

when you first activate AO in the bake texture tag then a twirly appears in the options part of the tag labelled 'ambient occlusion'. if you open the twirly you have a checkbox for 'to vertex map'.

cheers, simon w.

[JoelOtron]

Hi simon--yes--of course I found that right after posting :)

However--I noticed that on a plane (like the extruded landscape) I was getting the same results as Priest--vertex map is all "yellow", ie one value. If I tried it on a closed object (like a deformed sphere--it seemed to work fine.

Also--I thought that maybe changing the mapping to cubic might give different results--but this seems to lock c4d up.

[Simon Wicker]

it is a shame that the texture baking in cinema is still quite poor quality when it is actually a hugely important (and very overlooked) part of the toolset.

i'm currently wrestling with banding in the AO when you bake a texture.

all i can say is keep posting those bugs off to maxon.

the more they know about then the better chance to get these things fixed.

cheers, simon w.

[Byla]

Actually baking is not as straightforward as it seems aparently. I dont know the theory that well but I have in depth experience in baking, specially with Mental Ray and Cinema, and both render engines have very similar problems. Like if geometry is not dense enough, you get blotches, very often settings that are ok for normal rendering just dont work as good or much worse in baking (AO , GI sampling and so on), and in 80 % of practice with both render engines you have to at least minor fix them in photoshop.

thats my experience. And I find Cinema baking actually quite ok. These days I have to play with FR a bit I guess (gotta buy it first though)

[ThePriest]

I realized what I had done wrong.

I was trying to create the vertex map from an AO solution in the diffuse channel.
When I copied those settings and applied them to AO from the Render Options and baked again, I got the clean map I needed.

Thanks for other interesting solution JoelD

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