Can you bake a mental ray shader to a texture?

nervouspixels

Can you bake a mental ray shader to a texture?

Basically I want to create a really fancy MR shader, then throw some ambient GI lighting in and bake out texture map from this to use as a diffuse pass on some low poly stuff... Anyone know of a tut, or how to do something like this?

I'll take an answer in either maya or max...

nervouspixels

this would be the similar to Convert to File texture(maya)... in maya execpt it would be with MR... and could be done in max as well

chronic

You do this in Maya by assigning Bake Sets and using Batch Bake
Rendering Menu Set > Lighting/Shading

Ark

You can do this through the Render to Texture feature, press 0. Search the help for it.

nervouspixels

specifically I'd like to bake the sss fast shader as a base for some skin textures, is there a tutorial out there?

elec²ron

Mental ray sss shaders use the camera positioning in its calculations so i dont think you will get a bake from RTT working properly.

I think it will give you something in the render frame window so you could grab that and render it out from a few different angles then composite them together in ps. You would have to do it as a completely separate pass with a high ambient value so you dont get shadows and stuff in the frame window.

Dunno how well it would work but you could give it a try.