Hi All:

    Here are some pics illustrating my first "serious" use of the new mesh
camera feature to bake lightmaps. A detailed tutorial is on the works, but
basically I used the method I developed for the demo scene bundled with the
beta, just baking to plain white textures.

    The scene was created entirely with Wings3D, using the autoUV feature to
create uv maps for all the objects. The two attached screenshots of Wings3d
show the lightmaps loaded back into Wings, illustrating what can be done for
VR/games purposes. These could used as lightmaps with your preferred VR
application, gaming engine, WebGl app, etc...

    The other two attachements are POV-Ray renderings showing that the maps
can be used with POV-Ray too, to render unlighted scenes very, very quickly,
using just ambient or emission on the textures. This greatly helps when
making walkthrough animations, multiple views of the same scene, or multiple
versions with different textures...

    Judging from this first "serious" experiment, the feature seems to work
flawlessly, and I'm really excited by all the possibilities that it opens
for POV-Ray, specially in regards to where it can be used.

    The only drawback is that, currently, all the baking code has to be setup
manually with POV-Ray and shell scripts, and this can be tedious with big
scenes with hundreds of meshes... but I hope that existing external
applications will take over this task: a Wings3D plugin will be nice,
although a new "baking" tab for Poseray will be very useful too... and any
other app that uses POV-Ray to render could add automated baking with little
effort, I think.

    Of course there are some things that can be done better. HDRI ouput would
be the optimal format, but POV-Ray doesn't supports transparency there, at
the moment (it it's needed to mitigate the seams problem). Also, with big
scenes, it would be nice to be able to use the existing "clockless
animation" feature, to avoid re-parsing the scene for each mesh baked.

    Regards, and happy baking!

-- 
Jaime Vives Piqueres

http://www.ignorancia.org

Post a reply to this message

Attachments:
Download 'pantallazo-1.jpg' (205 KB) Download 'pantallazo-2.jpg' (200 KB) Download 'baked-room-04.jpg' (178 KB) Download 'baked-room-05.jpg' (193 KB)

Preview of image 'pantallazo-1.jpg'

Preview of image 'pantallazo-2.jpg'

Preview of image 'baked-room-04.jpg'

Preview of image 'baked-room-05.jpg'