Some how got distracted and i wanted to try "baking" lights and detail into a character, except i cant find any tutorials in maya about this. ive found a lot of it for Max ( but im not too proficient in it yet).
If someone could explain it to me a little, i feel like a real noob with this subject. and possible if somone could lemme know how i could achieve this in maya, id very much like to try it.
Replies
Click on your mat. in the hypershade>edit>convert to file texture
Mental ray for Maya:
Once in render mode>lighting/Shading>Batch Bake Mental Ray and you can bake to either verts or texture. Jeffro has a tut ( for baking to texture ) : http://www.jeffparrott.com/tutorials.html
1. put some lights in the scene that cast shadows
2. uv map your model in the 0-1 range, if you have overlapping uv's move those uv's out of the 0-1 range for the bake and then move them back later.
3. In Maya apply a white lambert shader to your object, select your object, edit polygons>colours>prelight(mentalray) click on the options box.
4. change bake from vertex to lightmap and change fully lit and shaded to incoming illumination only, also turn shadows on.
5. The rest of the options should be self explanitory. Click bake and it will put the file in the light maps folder underneath your current project, for example on my home pc. c:/art/lightmaps I have my project set to art. You can bake out finalgather too for some neat results.
thx alot.