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Baking textures and Prelighting
Baking textures and Prelighting
Bake sets
Baking illumination and color
In
a typical scene, you shade, texture, and light objects to create
the look you want, then you render. You can instead pre-render materials,
textures and illumination in a process called baking (by render
experts) or prelighting (by modeling experts).
Baking effectively freezes the illumination
(and shadow and surface color, if wanted) of baked objects into
an image file (if you bake to textures) or data (if you bake to
vertices) that you can later apply to objects.
After you bake objects and apply the prerendered
illumination to objects, you can simplify the scene by removing
lights, materials, and textures (shading networks). Instead of computing
illumination at render time, the renderer instead obtains it quickly
from the applied file image or data that is produced (depending
on what you bake to -- textures or vertices).
When to bake objects
- To
accelerate time- and processor-intensive renders, particularly for
complex shading networks or if mental ray for Maya’s global illumination
features are involved.
- To
optimize renders for use on simpler display devices (such as a console game
rendering engine).
- To
achieve lighting effects that would otherwise be difficult to achieve
in other ways.
- Export
to a platform that does not support certain shading effects. For example,
some graphic APIs only support a limited number of lights, and many
platforms have a limited amount of texture memory available. If you
bake the effects of the lights and textures onto the geometry, the lights
and textures can then be removed from the scene.