maya- bake vert lighting to texture?

rooster

Something I'd like to try is to vertex prelight a level Im making, beacuse of the ease of tweakability in the lighting, and the lighting I'm trying to achieve is tricky. the problem is the engine doesnt support vert prelighting from an external source (it can only calcualte its own which isnt much good for what I want).. I'm wondering if its possible in maya to bake vertex lighting into texture, similar to baking normal lighting? Any ideas?

Jeff Parrott

Something like this?

http://www.jeffparrott.com/mentalray_01.html

rooster

hmm, does that actually bake the vert lighting info into the texture? I've been trying that way and the bake seems to ignore vert lighting and just use the regular maya lights

pyromania

Do the same thing that jeffro's tutorial shows, but change the Bake To, to verticies. That will get all the lighting baked down to vertex color. Then to save the vertex color out go to Edit Polygons>>Color>> Paint vertex color option box ( the [] next to it) In the paint vertex color options there is a drop down for Attribute map. Here you can export the vertex color out as a texture file.

rooster

awesomness, thanks guys. The help files are fubard in our maya, and the 'make help work!' instructions well- don't..
cheers!