Bake Xoliul Shader to texture

FishMan

Hi. Is there any solution to bake specular from xoliul shader to texture? Or can i somehow grab the "composed" texture (or just a specular like in 3ds max render elements) from video card memory?...

Thanks.

Xoliul

Not recommended, just because of the way it works: specular is dependent of the angle you view the model from, baking that to texture bakes it into a texture so it;s the same from every view. It's probably not going to look as good as you want it to.

On top of that, while it is technically possible, it requires some crazy rewriting of the shader to turn it into a big hack for render to texturing. In short: not possible.

Can you elaborate a bit more what you want to achieve? Nowadays there's ways to do this stuff faster and smarter but I have no idea what your goal is.

FishMan

Well basicly we've got a mobile game (a shooter where player can't move, he can just look around) that doesn't support any specular especially so complex as in your shader (and maybe no lighting at all) i done weapon model with texures (Diffuse, Tangent Space Normal Maps, Gloss, Spec) and i just want to bake it to diffuse map (i done all the texturing using Xoliul shader (don't ask why - it is a long story, shortly: i dint know at the start what technology will be avalible)).

I know that specaular is angle depended, but for the project i made this asset it will work fine.

BTW When i say "specular" i mean "reflection" basicly i want to bake a cubemap to diffuse.

Basicly I can render object space normal map and apply the shader with it to a plane after that i can make a screenshot and use it as a texture, but i'am looking some solutions like "render to texture" or grab the "composed" texture from video card memory, becase it's faster than render additional normal maps and i can rotate the model to get a best reflect from art prespective that can be composed to a diffuse.

Xoliul

I see. Like I said, in short just not possible unless you write some complex hacks.
Also again: this is going to look bad. You're better off just applying hand-painted tricks that have been done for ages for weapons, than to try to render this stuff out. Have a look at these: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/64286672/Skinning_Tuts_PDF.zip

Though huge disclaimer: If I were to do diffuse-only stuff, I would take a different approach. Do it right from the start. Also I'd probably automate a bunch of this stuff, especially since you have normalmaps, you could get Substance Designer to spit out a lot of the stuff your are after, in a very efficient/fast way.

FishMan

Hey. That is what I did actually using your amazing shader. I decided that you should know about it. This shader was pretty good actually. 
I want to say thank you for it. It's a pity that you decided to bury it.

People even asking how I did PBR in your shader I think that's the best compliment to you. By the way may be I was the last person in the world who was using your shader. Just kidding ))