Baking Plug-ins?

#21

Hi, Uwe

Oh, yes, “gratitude is the most momentary of all feelings” :slight_smile:

Uwe, it’s very easy to find at least 10 such problems in render (weight maps?) and 100 such prolems in app. In any 3D app, not in EI only. But… and what from that? “We should report to host in order to fix it immediately”? It looks a bit naive, there are no hosts that runs immediately. The usual formula “(maybe) it will be fixed in next vers”, and it’s normal. Many and many max’s bugs live long and happy from vers 4 yet, but there we never heard labels like “old fashioned”, “very limited” etc :slight_smile:

Let us back to “plug-ins baking” (our original theme). “Why plug-in repeats calculation over and over?” - we heard this Q at least 25 times at recent 3 years. Ok, now we propose a solution. Maybe our solution isn’t perfect, maybe it’s even bad (quite possible). But… we see you aren’t interested in this little tech detail, you prefer to discuss other themes (now your prjs have not this problem). Very well, let’s talk about occlusion baking, renderama probs etc, - that’s also interested for us. But please count: it’s a talk only, not our concrete proposition as a plug-ins baking was.

#22

EI has never really been suited for OpenGL type applications like previs and game construction. However, with the advent of 6.5 I could see a potential shift in that area if we could develop a few handy tools.

When I construct previs in Maya we use a large number of visual cheats to make an OpenGL hardware rendering look like its almost been software rendered by baking the lighting into simple texture maps. Maya only supports 8 hardware lights and that usually isn’t enough. By baking lighting into the textures we get the appearance of more. Its a fast, no cost solution. Its a far simpler solution than a full blown radiosity requirement or even baking the information into the geometry. Though both of those are much cooler.

Personally, I would love to see a plugin that acts similar to Steamroller. Child objects are parented to the plug, the plug analyzes the children, fires off renderings to Camera and for each object under the plugin, texture maps are generated that include all the software rendered textures and lighting and saves a new texture map that can be applied back to the object in animator using standard texture controls. I would desire individual maps for each objects. Or, for the sake of speed, the entire scene could be rendered and a applied back onto the geometry as a camera map. Those textures could then been utilized in animator by activating “Display Texture” for the object. Acceptible for OpenGL type applications and can work quite readily in a software rendered solution.

Is this solution as cool as radiosity or geometry/occlusion baking? No… but it certainly could be useable. Its great for creating fake shadows under objects, lights up against walls and stuff like that.

#23

I truly believe its worth exploring.

#24

Cause you said “occlusion texture baking”

We heard a young talent said to Tomas Addison “I discovered an universal diluent, it dissolves absolute all!”. And Tomas answered like: “In what bottle you’ll save it?”. We aren’t Addisons, but let us ask you: “Your arithmetic with 1000 frames is perfect, but how do you plan to setup such scene?”

32x32 is out of the question. Even 8x8 is not enough for animation anywhere (count EI)

Bravo, Jens. We always appreciate a man who has his own opinion out of chorus. But developers cannot afford such luxury - they are more dependent from common public opinion. We too

#25

Hello Igors,

Yes, sure. Right now, when I attempt something like baking in EI - that means making an occlusion pass and use it as a texture afterwards - I never set it to 1x1 but use default settings. This works very well. My question was, why this should not work when baking to a texture?

I setup such a scene like I setup every other scene also. Place models, light models, making testrenders, test things multipass in Photoshop, and decide for a final look. I most always do this with occlusion. I do not understand the question in this regard. What should be different in the setup of a scene with and without baking?

Again, its my personal experience from 12 years of working as a 3D professional. One of the best new features in EI 2.7.5 was “shadow object only” and “generate shadow mask” and camra maps - not really buzz word features. In the old days proposals for such feature came directly from professionals who worked with the software - aka ILM - and this where the features that lifted EI into the highend realm.

There are different types of features for developers in general to take care of. First is the feature for the advertising billboards - the buzz word features, yes, I agree these are important. But there is a level beyond marketing and that is keeping users to stay with a software and to keep them happy (actually this is also markting). These second type of features do not shine in the ads, but shine when you work. Good software has both. Its not a luxury at all to have such a solid basis.

O2F is a perfect example. What does it do? It is a stupid file converter - not really a shiny software, and sure a feature that should be built into host. But it isn’t. And you know what? Eventhough it does not create buzz at all it sells and sells, because people need this to work. Do people like to buy O2F? No. Because they would rather like to see this in host (me also). But it isn’t.

All buzz does not help if you unpack your new toy but you need to recharge the batteries all 15 minutes - unless somone invents a solution for this. Until then it is waisted money.

Jens

#26

Hi, Jens

Look at movie Uwe posted recently (Modo discussion). That’s a “normal” radiosity (we absolute don’t know how it’s actually named though). The “illum resolutions = vertices resolution”. But not same for texture. Yes, you can render a GI pass and then use this map, but it has nothing in common with baking as we know it. Because your GI render is view-dependent. If an object is far away it occupies a several pixels only. Yes, you can bake them but you cannot hope for something rational if a camera is closer to it (like Uwe walks in his room). And without “I can fly!” the baking idea looses its charm momentary.

Oh, yeah, we also were amazed from abilities that “shadow mask” gives! In most case a result looks like “absolute natural”, but… impossible to achieve without this feature! We tried to explain, but… no luck, people say like “What do you try to show?” (it’s soo obvious, it should be):slight_smile:

Hmm… and maybe they are right? (same as about EPS import). It’s always a good idea to think before writing a product, not after.

Jens, your philosophic sentences have no answers (at least for us). We can say only: it would be an absolute crazy and intolerant world with “professionals only” :slight_smile:

#27

Hello Igors,

:slight_smile: Agreed.

All I wanted to say was, that suggestions from professionals for features that do not create buzz but good workflow should be seriously considered.

Jens

#28

Look at movie Uwe posted recently (Modo discussion).

it was Hans, not me.

All I wanted to say was, that suggestions from professionals for features that do not create buzz but good workflow should be seriously considered.

amen

#29

Hi, Uwe

Yes, it was Hans, sorry for our confusion

#30

The scene was one object with one UV mapped texture (small texturemap, low render settings), just to test the baking process.

The GI ‘pass’ is not view dependent, it’s baked GI based on the UV map of the model.

This was the GI bake from the test model:

Imagine you separate objects (floor, wall etc) and bake separate high res Images (maybe only an occlusion pass). Then you can Phong render interior animation with a GI appearance and without the GI splotches jumping around :wink:

For me this kind of baking gives me new possibilities, keep the render-times low, and still have nice GI/occlusion scenes.

I would love to do the baking in EI, even if it was only occlusion…

Cheers

Hans

#31

This is the same process I use in Maya for previs. Maya’s bake lighting capabilities can create texture maps that can be aligned with the target’s UVs and the results are quite beneficial.

It does automatically what I tend to do by hand in EI with standard mapping techniques and snapshots taken from key locations.

#32

Jens,

what happened to the Ramjac gallery? You had an example in there of a Lightwave scene where the lighting was baked out to a texture, then the model was converted with OBJ2FACT and rendered in EIAS.

I’ve always remembered that example of texture baking (from an app that could do it) combined with render speed from EIAS.

#33

Hi, Hans

For us it’s always interested to see different appreciations of same things :slight_smile: Imagine EI proposed (announced) a technique for such scene as you posted. We know well what would happen :slight_smile: Hans would be one of first who pointed out on these visible edges, “faceting” etc. “Professional soft should not…” (right, Jens?). But… it’s not in EI, thus your loyality turns on 180 degrees: “it’s interested”, “give new abilities”, and, of course, it’s sooo bad that EI has not it.

How about to learn a toy carefully before ask it here? Where is a “production” test that Jens likes to talk about but absolute doesn’t hurry to do when he has such ability? Why Hans is in modest silence about how long was baking phase for his scene? :slight_smile:

#34

ohhhh - I hurry :slight_smile: I did not post an image here, but be sure I work on it - didn’t I show you my latest renders? The animation will (and does already) utilize baking. Its also not sooo important that this is in EI, since Modo does this very well - so its all there, but not for the average customer who only wants to work in one package - and needs to make a decision what package to buy (and looks up the buzz word list for illumination baking).

Why are you so sure that baking in EI would produce such bad response? Where do you see loyality turning 180° because baking is not in EI? If people would not be loyal, they would not say anything here.

I need to redo the O2F gallery. When we initially made O2F the conversion of baked objects was sure very interesting for us - so we made this Lightwave test. I hav also baked illumination in Maya for an earlier project and brought the model with O2F to EI. Back in that days baking was not very userfriendly. But with Modo you just push a button and thats it.

There will be a new O2F gallery showing the results. But I can not say when.

Jens

Here is the Animation with baked illumination from Maya (no illunination from lights in the scene) rendered in EI (in 2004). Ah, and yes, the animation has exactly 1000 Frames :slight_smile:

http://www.jcm-animation.de/downloads/Inkallakta.mov

#35

Baking occlusion/GI is already part of many users pipeline. Those that need this functionality find a way, I have used lightwave to do this for ages. A big caveat is that unless there is a compelling reason to render in EIAS (mforge for example), then it’s usually much easier & quicker to stay in the other package. It is for this reason that I have found myself using EIAS less & less for what I bought it for - it’s SPEED! Having the means to bake out lighting etc from within EIAS would reverse that trend.

#36

this would be me for instance.
my modeling needs are well covered with Silo and EI Modeler (yes, i still use it), so i have no plans to buy Modo just to use baking.
there are ways to fake something like this in EIAS right now, but the process is long and not a real pleasure. jens will remember the garage we did a few years ago. it wasn’t perfect to todays standarts, but it worked.
and i also can see the benefit of just one very long renderhit compared to 1000s frames of GI rendering.
what if radiosity could calculate it’s solution to a texture, so avoiding the high-poly count on final render?
well, i would always prefer GI baking.

#37

Hi, Uwe

We glad to see you begin to understand us :slight_smile:

Let us explain what we know (of course, we can mistake). The “Occlusion Baking” is NOT a principal new technique, it’s SAME radiosity, just with another “output cascade”. Yes, you’ve a map (or set of maps) instead of tons of vertices (who knows what’s better?), but it changes nothing in core radiosty engine. The radiosity remains radiosity

#38

Hi, Jens

We appreciate your opinion, but it still would be preferable to see a concrete animation and concrete render/baking times to discuss how well Modo does this

Nice movie but please agree: it has zero information about how fast and easy it can be achieved

#39

I’ll let you know as soon as I have something to report.

It was not easy at all, since baking in Maya - at least back in 2004 - was not very intuitive, since Maya is not very intuitiv, at least not for me. Brian may have another opinion about Maya. It also took a long time to calculate (several houres) This is also the reason why I did not used this further. But it was the only way to create something like a “GI” render in EI back than. Rendering was on the other hand very fast - just geometry with textures, and some ray lights. Of course much faster than if I used GI which was not present in EI in 2004.

Maybe Hans can give some benchmark results for his test with the room?

Jens

#40

My workflow is very straightforward, Modeling in Modo (EIM for special modeling needs) & I do ALL my animation/rendering in EIAS, as I did the past 10 years :wink:

When I use GI in EIAS on animation, I render a separate GI pass, and composite it in post, this way I have more control (and the jumping GI splotches effect can be reduced). I like EIAS GI rendering. it’s fast, and I get the “Camera” quality I want. But a GI animation pass takes a lot of render-time, and you can’t easily re-render when you need to do small adjustments to your animation. So the use of GI is always a cost vs. benefit decision.

The situation has changes for me since a few weeks ago, my Modeler could suddenly bake all sorts of information into texture-maps. When scene objects have baked occlusion textures, a re-render is very fast, EIAS fast :slight_smile:

Sorry about the baking time silence:

14 min, I don’t think that’s bad for a baked occlusion (on my 3 year old Mac).
(the ‘jaggies’ at the edges are repeated pixels to overlap the UV’s by a few pixels)

A scene I am working on now took about 6 hours of baking time (6 4K textures), and Camera is rendering the animations for this scene with the speed and quality I like so much. Setting up the model for a occlusion bake takes no time at all besides creating UV maps.

The advantage of a baked texture vs. a baked radiosity solution into the model, is predictability and control (for example; a baked texture can be edited in photoshop). I never used Radiosity in production, the whole proces is just to time consuming.

Until recently I didn’t use baking, as it was not possible with the applications I use in my workflow. Now I tasted it, I can’t imagine I ever worked without it, it’s like Raytracing, remember when we did all our work with only Phong rendering.

Now why would baking in EIAS be interesting for me now that Modo can do this? That’s easy to explain, from what I’ve seen in Modo so-far, Camera is the better renderer, faster, and better quality. For me it would be great if I could work on the scene, send baking to Renderama, and continue working.

Cheers

Hans