Hello all,
For an upcoming project I want to bake in radiosity and shadows, I’ve been experimenting with the Render to Texture feature in MAX 7, and I like the results I’ve seen so far, was wondering if anyone has any pointers or knows of any tutorials that might help me learn about it, or knows of a better way to do it, as this will be my first attempt at doing it on a large scene.
Here are a few of the things I’m looking for or questions I’ve run into thusfar… As well as some general info on the scene/project.
Max 7, preferably doing it by using native features, or with free addons. The final scene will be output to a realtime engine. And will only use diffuse maps, and a rare opacity map (alpha channel targa).
My thought thusfar will be to wait to do this process until the scene is fully built, so that it can take into acount light bouncing off of all objects in the scene, and shadows cast from all objects in the scene to get the most realistic result possible… Is this the right approach?
With that approach, I’m assuming there is a way to batch process all the textures/objects in the scene?
One small problem I’ve run into thusfar is, when I make a texture, I’ll paint more area of the map than I need (an extra pixel or two depending on the shape), in order to account for… for lack of a better term, color bleeding into the final result from neighboring pixels… But when I bake in lighting/shadows, the output only gets the pixels that are mapped to geometry, and loses the extra texture area. The only suggestion to compensate for this was from a friend of mine who suggested outputting to a format that has an alpha, taking the final result, and making duplicate layers in photoshop, running a series of blurs on them, then with a unblurred copy of the baked image as the top layer… Anyone else found another approach that works well?
Thanks for any input.
JT