Baking into... diffuse?

Buzzer

I just got the strangest request from a client: he has a standard set of textures (diffuse + normal + specular) that he wants to convert to diffuse only. In other words, he wants the detail from normal + specular baked into the diffuse.

He also told me to use a fixed lightsource, placed at the middle of the texture (to avoid breaking the seamless ones and not have a strange behavior). I have no idea on how i'm gonna do this. Any ideas? Thanks in advance!

metalliandy

I suppose you could set up the scene with all the textures in your application and then do a bake of everything.

Eric Chadwick

What software?

3ds Max can do this, using Render To Texture. Set up the models with their maps in a renderable material, set up the lighting you want, and bake a Complete map.

Except the specular isn't going to bake nicely because it's view dependent. Instead you want the highlight to be in world space, and not change with the viewing angle. To get around this you could use the specular map as a mask, and set up a Falloff map that's aligned to the light. Just have to twiddle the Falloff's spline to get the specular look.

Good luck!

Buzzer

I thought about creating a plane in 3DS Max, creating a material for each texture and rendering into a complete map, but that seems very time consuming since i have more than 200 textures.

Eric Chadwick

Oh, yuck then.

You need the maps to be on the models if you want to bake the lighting from normal maps. Unless they're already flat walls or something.

You could batch it... if you apply the maps to each model, and set them all up in one Max file, you can select them all and invoke RTT. It will render each model's CompleteMap to its own file.