Texture Bake Set

For more information on bake sets, see Bake sets.

Texture bake set attributes

Color Mode

Determines the baking mode for the scene. Select one of the following:

Light and Color: Bakes light and color information.
Only Light: Bakes only lighting information.
Only Global Illumination: Bakes only global illumination information
Occlusion: Bakes occlusion information.
Custom Shader: Bakes the specified custom shading network into the bake set.

Occlusion Rays: Determines the number of occlusion rays to trace per sample point. Increasing the number of occlusion rays improves quality, but reduces performance speed. The default is 64.
Occlusion Falloff: Determines the maximum length of an occlusion ray. Rays longer than this value are not considered for occlusion.

For texture bake sets, if Final Gather is not used, occlusion is computed for all sample points. Although this takes time, the result is very sharp light maps. If Final Gather is used, and the final gather quality is greater than 0, the occlusion is pre-baked into a final gather map. This final gather map can then be interpolated during rendering providing quick results at a reasonable quality.
Custom Shader: Use the new Custom Shader attribute to connect a custom shading network to your bake set.

To use this attribute, Color Mode must be set to Custom Shader, then you can map the Custom Shader field to the shading network.
Normal Direction: Use the Normal Direction drop-down list to set the direction of the baked object’s resulting normals. Select from Face Camera (towards the camera), Surface Front (outwards from the object surface), and Surface Back (inwards from the object surface).
Orthogonal Reflection: This option is on by default. When turned on, the Orthogonal Reflection option causes all reflection rays to be orthogonal to the surface being baked. They are no longer true reflection rays, pointing instead parallel to the surface normal vectors, but the resulting baked texture or vertex colors are meaningful when viewed later from any direction. This option should be turned on if the textures or vertex colors generated are to be used as textures in a game engine.

Turn this option off if you are baking in order to accelerate software rendering and the reflections are only viewed from the baked position. However, in this case, the textures or vertex colors generated are not for use as textures in a game engine.
Filename Prefix: Any bitmaps generated by this bake set are prefixed with what is typed in this box. When Bake to One Map is checked, what you type in this box becomes the filename.
x resolution, y resolution: The horizontal and vertical resolution of the image file, measured in pixels. The slider range is 1 to 512. The default value is 256.
File format: Lets you choose a format in which to save the file texture. The default is IFF.
Bits per channel: Specifies the number of bits per channel to use in the output bitmap.
Number of Samples: Use this option to specify the number of samples (per pixel) that is used for anti-aliasing during baking. The default value is 1, and the maximum value is 4.
Bake to One Map: Any objects assigned to this bake set is baked to the map. (Make sure the object’s UVs are not overlapped.)
Bake Alpha: Turn this on to bake the alpha channel (equivalent to Maya’s Bake Transparency option) and then select an Alpha Mode.

Note
When you turn Bake Alpha on, the transparency connection is automatically made for you when you add a surface shader.
Alpha mode: When Bake Alpha is turned on, the Alpha Mode specifies how it’s computed. Select one of the options, which include Pass Through (alpha as output from shading network) Surface Transparency, Luminance of Surface Color, and Coverage.

Note
The Pass Through option is mainly for custom shader usage within Maya. The returned baked color alpha component is retained and is not further affected by Maya's matte channel. Custom shaders usually set the fourth component of a mental ray color to provide the alpha channel.
Final Gather Quality: Determines the final gather precompute quality. When rendering from the camera, mental ray precomputes a final gather pass before actually rendering the scene. This precomputation pass is disabled by default for baking.

When this attribute is set to higher than zero, mental ray computes a number of final gather points before it bakes the lightmap. When this attribute is set to one, the resulting lightmap should be of approximately the same quality as a lightmap rendered from the camera. When this attribute is set higher than one, then the quality of the lightmap is improved as a denser map of final gather points is precomputed.

Do not use this option to tune final gather quality for baking. Final gather quality affects the number of points calculated at the precomputation phase of the final gather algorithm. By increasing the final gather quality, you are only creating more points during precomputation and possibly reducing the amount of interpolation or exterpolation required during rendering. Increasing the final gather quality does not affect the accuracy of the light calculated for each point or the filtering that is used on the data.

Instead, adjust the Scale in the Render Settings window. This attribute controls the accuracy of the light calculated for each final gather point. Adjust also the View (Radii in Pixel Size). This attribute controls how data is interpolated/extrapolated between final gather points.
Final Gather Reflect: Determines the reflectivity of an object when precomputing final gather points for light mapping. This simplifies the simulation of reflective objects whose texture maps include contributions from objects that surround them. For example, if the Final Gather Reflect value is set to 0.25, every fourth final gather point is precomputed on the object hit by the reflection ray.
UV range: Specifies whether to bake the area in UV space from [0,0] to [1,1], bake the entire UV space, or bake a manually specified space range.
U min, U max: Slider values specify how much to stretch the sampling range of U or V components. Maya stretches the sample region to fit the output image size within the [0,0] to [1,1] sampling range.
V min, V max: Minimum V and maximum V for baking.

Background Mode

When converting a file to a texture, occasionally some of the pixels along texture edges are missed. As a result parts of the geometry are not properly covered and the background color shows through. In the Background Mode drop-down list, there are three options for managing this situation.

Shader Default: A default color is applied to the background. The color may be a blend of the shader colors. This option is intended for compatibility with previous versions of Maya. This is the default.
Custom Color: Specify a color to apply to the background. For example, this can be useful if you want to import the file texture into image editing software and want a special key (color) to select the background for processing.
Extend Edge Color: Looks at the neighboring pixels’ colors to determine the appropriate background color to extend the texture pattern at the edges. This option provides the best quality in some situations.

Background Color: Specifies the color to apply to the background when Custom Color is selected for the Background Mode.
Fill texture seams: If the selected UV space contains boundaries, these boundaries may appear as black stripes in renderings that use the baked textures. This occurs when the texture is sampled so close to a boundary that the filter picks up values (generally black) from outside the desired space.

This setting artificially extends the boundaries by a small amount to alleviate this problem. It is measured in texels (pixels of texture). Typically, the filter is only a few texels in diameter and can only reach as far as its radius into these boundary spaces, so a value of 1 or 2 is usually enough.
Override mesh UV set assignments: Activate this option to bake meshes as if they were in the specified UV set instead of the UV sets to which they are currently associated.
UV set name: The UV set to use for the meshes in this textureBakeSet.