baking lightmaps takes aaaaaaaaaages?

[Necropolis]

Hmmmm, so the scene with the Dirtmap shader takes 3 minutes to render in Mental Ray, but when you go to bake the textures it is taking hours? Just for the sake of trying something, have you tried unchecking Use Bake Set Override and just letting it go with the default settings. Just as a base comparison. I would bet its probably something in there thats gumming things up. I find that baking can take a while longer then a single frame, but the whole point is to save you render time when it comes to the bulk of it. I mean if you have 300 frames, and each frame takes 3 min's just to get the AO pass thats 900 minutes. But if you could say bake it for 120 min, and then get a render time of say 1 min. per frame you would have saved yourself 480 min. Thats eight hours!! While waiting for it to bake you just got to remind yourself of all that time you are saving! :)

Now if its a case of you have a simple sphere inside a box and its taking that long then we need to figure out whats up. But for your average detailed model that baking is going to take a while. Its just the nature of the beast.

Necropolis

Edit- The other thing is since samples play such an important role in the balance of speed vs. image quality I have been toying with using fewer samples to bake with and then going into Photoshop and applying a blur that would even out a bit of the grain that comes from fewer samples. So far its worked ok but I wouldn't call it production proven. Just a suggestion for you.

[playmesumch00ns]

Yeah that's the thing, it's a sphere, torus, cone, cube and plane. Reason I'm trying to bake this out is with the thought of using the baked textures in PRMan, but if it's taking this long, I might as well bake the raytracing in PRMan too!

[Necropolis]

Yeah well then now that would be an issue. On such a simple scene like that it shouldn't be that bad.

I am such a message board neophyte. How do you post pictures on this thing?

Basically I did a test. If I can figure out how to post pictures I will show you. Essentailly I did a straight AO render with the Dirtmap shader at 128 samples. The scene was a sphere, a cone, and a box all inside of a box. It took 4 min to render a frame. I then baked it out at 256 x 256, but changed the samples to 64. It took about 15 min to do the bake. I then did a macro in Photoshop to Guassian Blur the entire folder of those baked maps. It took maybe 4 min. Then I rerendered the scene and that took maybe 30 seconds a frame. Now there were some artifacts created by the baking that I would have to go in and remove from the texture but those happend at the tips of the cone and the sphere.

Hope that helps. If I could get some help on how the heck to get a picture in this thing I would be more then happy to show you my results.

Necropolis

[lazzhar]

I think it's normal that baking would be longer than then rendering.
Necropolis, just find a server where you could post your files or pictures. go to the Gallery section and you'll find a list of them. Upload there, then come here and put a link.

[Necropolis]

Thanks lazzhar. I figured it couldn't be as easy as inserting it. And definatly baking takes longer then rendering a single frame, but 1 hour plus for what he is doing is a little bit much.

Necropolis

[playmesumch00ns]

I think I might have been using 256 samples in Dirtmap. I was also doing other things on my box at the same time.

Reason I want to use mental ray is it's raytracing is much faster than PRMan's, but I have to bake the GI from mental to read it back into PRMan. However, it would just work out a hell of a lot quicker to render out a GI pass from PRMan, or bake it and then use that than use mental ray's baking. It should no way take that long. And if I was going to use it, I'd need to be baking 2k or 4k maps like every other frame.:shrug:

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