CGTalk - baking textures but what do i do about these reflections?

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mcbridecasey

07-30-2007, 12:46 PM

Im using mental ray and final gather to bake textures to buildings for an animation in Maya 8.5. The baked shaders are coming out great except when I bake anything reflective. Those reflective surfaces would constantly change as the camera moves. If they are baked they would keep the initial image from the frame they were baked. How would I treat reflections and transparency in the glass and still get quick render times?

Rens

07-30-2007, 02:03 PM

You could use baking for anything that isn't reflective/refractive, then assign a shader with those maps but with reflection/refraction switched on. That'll save you some time at least.

When using a moving camera there really isn't getting around having to calculate each frame if you're looking for very accurate reflections, either for baking or for final output.

Another way is to use environment maps which will render very fast, but you won't have objects reflecting other scene objects. For stuff like windows you could render out a couple of fish-eye maps from a camera placed at the window location. Then use that as an environment map. You can get away with it in alot of cases.
Games use alot of tricks like this to get realtime but not 100% accurate reflections.

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