Texture Baking and Mental Ray Max

oXYnary

You know, unless I'm using it wrong, mental ray is much faster at baking normal maps and light maps with its mr sun and mr sky. Total noob on mental ray, so the few I have tried look funky (light map). Anyone use mental ray with a mr sky and sun that can give me some pointers of how they set theirs up for ambient texture baking? This is just for some ambient lighting on the surface to help give it that extra bit of kick and help with creating the diffuse (i.e. I know where everything is on the uv layout).

I can go back to just regular sky and light tracing. But again, man this seems faster by X amount.

(and why this matters is I'm trying to bake, oh, about 30 individual parts separately to combine! :O )

Eric Chadwick

Funky means what exactly? Could be a ton of things. Can you show an image?

oXYnary

I'm not sure I can. Will ask. I think the main thing is I just don't know all these new options its offering. Instead of jumping off the deep end, just start with a lightmap in MR and work my way towards larger things.

I went back and tweaked with the regular scanline and got it to cut down the render time. Still not as fast as the MR one though. Enough to get by however.

oXYnary

Holy Crap! Well, maybe having this thread will help someone in the future.

http://scottdewoody.com/tutorial_occ.html