Can you bake a mental ray shader to a texture?

nervouspixels · Jun 2011

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 · Jun 2011

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 · Jun 2011

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

Ark · Jun 2011

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

nervouspixels · Jun 2011

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

elec²ron · Jun 2011

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.

Can you bake a mental ray shader to a texture?

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