Baking lighting info w/ a normal map in Maya?

ebagg

I'm wondering if anyone knows how to bake information from a low poly character, with the normal mapping texture info in a lit scene, into a texture file? I'm toying with Surface Sampler, toying with the "Diffuse Map" and "Lit and Shaded Color Map" output settings and so far I'm getting black image files.

rooster

hi man, I had similar problems trying to do the same with mental ray image based lighting which I still havent managed.. what renderer you using?

Rob Galanakis

I've never had any problems with the Surface Sampler and Maya Software renderer (never tried it with mental ray). Just keep reading the docs and keep trying, I guess.

Daz

Have you access to 8.0 ebagg? So you want the normal info baked into a diffuse texture right? I just got maya to spit this out using transfer maps (choose 'shaded' for the output map). Note that you need to make it a .tiff. Other formats dont seem to work. I haven't got access to older versions of maya so I can't try it with the surface sampler I'm afraid. But I suspect that .tiff only works for that too. Other formats set as the output map will result in black images as opposed to any kind of useful error message.

ebagg

Damn Daz, that's exactly what I'm looking for. I'll have to check out 8.0, I'm working in 7.

rooster

hah I guess I'll give tiff a try too lol.. nice

Whargoul

You can do it with just the normal mapped low poly if you use the mental ray renderer, use the "batch bake" to do it. I did some AO mapping on normal mapped characters this way in a pinch.