On 9/23/2010 6:46 AM, Jaime Vives Piqueres wrote:
> 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!
>

Certainly this looks like something PoseRay could automate. I would have 
to look into it and will be looking forward to your tutorial since the 
documentation for this camera mode is sparse at the moment.

FlyerX

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