Programming a texture baker?
polycounter lvl 6
I know there a few excellent ones already out there like MightBake and Knald 
I wanted to out of personal curiousity and learning experience to try work on my own. I'm having trouble finding technical information on how to approach programming such a software. Most results are about an overview of the process intended for artists to understanding baking and how to use existing software.
I get that ray tracing and a cage seem to be used for baking diffuse or normal maps from high poly(vertex colours for diffuse I believe?) to low poly. Does anyone know where I could read about the math or example code involved? I'm happy to use an existing ray tracer like Nvidia's Optix or something open source on Github.
Not sure how many here could help point me in the right direction, maybe a Knald or MightBake dev could drop some hints
I wanted to out of personal curiousity and learning experience to try work on my own. I'm having trouble finding technical information on how to approach programming such a software. Most results are about an overview of the process intended for artists to understanding baking and how to use existing software.I get that ray tracing and a cage seem to be used for baking diffuse or normal maps from high poly(vertex colours for diffuse I believe?) to low poly. Does anyone know where I could read about the math or example code involved? I'm happy to use an existing ray tracer like Nvidia's Optix or something open source on Github.
Not sure how many here could help point me in the right direction, maybe a Knald or MightBake dev could drop some hints
Replies
It's basically baking, but focused on lighting for environments. You can then extend the operation to render other attributes like normals, ambient occlusion etc.
I think these are useful:
- http://www.flipcode.com/archives/Light_Mapping_Theory_and_Implementation.shtml
- http://www.scratchapixel.com/
- http://www.inf.pucrs.br/~flash/tcg/aulas/RadTutorial.html