Maya 2016 & LT, TURTLE Lightmap Baking

Axi5

Hi guys and gals,

I want to get some lightmaps baked for work but I can't seem to get TURTLE set up the way I'd like. I've assigned objects to a bake layer (the default in this case) & I've hit the "Compute Scale and Texture Sizes" below:

However I can't find any way to get TURTLE to respect this (I've even tried changing the Ilr Bake Res Override to yes), since it just seems to go by the setting in the Render Settings window:

My other problem is that on smooth/round objects I keep getting these shadow artifacts:

They go away with more geometry but that solution doesn't really work for me. Any other ideas?

Also, are there are any decent light-mapping standalone/plugins for 3DS Max or Maya with a similar idea of automatically assigning a texture size based on scene scale? If not, I might try scripting a basic one sometime but I haven't written a Maya script in some time.

Cheers!

Edit:
To re-iterate, the problem is that I can't get the correct texture resolution output. In the bake layer I've tried to set it to max: 2048 and computed the other maps sizes, but Turtle keeps spewing out the 512 ones located in render settings, despite setting Ilr override to On it still doesn't work, is there a way to override this? I can work around the shadow artifacts.

thomasp

Axi5 said:

My other problem is that on smooth/round objects I keep getting these shadow artifacts:

They go away with more geometry but that solution doesn't really work for me. Any other ideas?

i'm not familiar with turtle myself but assuming you are using shadow maps here then it just looks like their resolution and/or accuracy is set too low. check if you have settings for shadow properties and play with them.

Axi5

Thanks Thomas,

I couldn't find any accuracy setting for shadow properties, besides rays & depth but switching to a depth map instead did the trick. 1 problem down!

Edit: They used raytraced shadows by default if that's any help.

JedTheKrampus

Raytraced shadows have that problem with geometry that's curved but doesn't have loads of polys. You can solve it by baking lightmaps with Turtle's surface transfer and a more smoothed out version of the mesh around 100k polys as the source surface. Inconvenient but effective (much like Turtle itself.)

Axi5

I discovered that the raytraced shadows can be fixed using bias shadow rays.

Still no idea about the texture override, the MEL command for running TURTLE is this:

ilrTextureBakeCmd -target "pCubeShape1" -target "pCylinderShape1" -target "pConeShape1" -frontRange 0 -backRange 200 -frontBias 0 -backBias -100 -transferSpace 1 -selectionMode 0 -mismatchMode 0 -envelopeMode 0 -ignoreInconsistentNormals 1 -considerTransparency 0 -transparencyThreshold 0.001000000047 -camera "persp" -normalDirection 0 -shadows 1 -alpha 1 -viewDependent 0 -orthoRefl 1 -backgroundColor 0 0 0 -frame 1 -bakeLayer TurtleDefaultBakeLayer -width 512 -height 512 -saveToRenderView 0 -saveToFile 1 -directory "C:/Users/darrell/Documents/maya/projects/default/turtle/bakedTextures/" -fileName "baked_$p_$s.$e" -fileFormat 9 -visualize 0 -uvRange 0 -uMin 0 -uMax 1 -vMin 0 -vMax 1 -uvSet "" -tangentUvSet "" -edgeDilation 5 -bilinearFilter 1 -merge 0 -conservative 0 -windingOrder 1 -illumination 1 -useRenderView 1 -layer defaultRenderLayer

There is still a -width and -height parameter about halfway through. I tried removing it & running but it just crashed Maya. I can't think/find any variables that might go in that place either, such as ilrresx or something.

Edit: Making it a bit clearer.

Axi5

GOT IT!

After reading through the MEL scripts I realized that for overrides to work it has to be run through the command line.

I'll write up a How-To when I get back from work.

Edit: Also, it is impossible via Maya LT, you need the Render.exe in full Maya.