#1 request - exporting procedural textures Tweet

[colorlabs]

I await your description of the problems w/this feature!

[face]

I don´t know Cinema, but have every mesh a bakemap?

I know how it works and how i use it in my Softimage exporter. I can give a mesh a property, if i want to generate a baked textur.
In this property i can adjust the uv i want to use, the picture format, the save location and some things what i want to bake (diffuse, spec....)
The exporter search for that property and if one is find, he runs the bake routine. After that, the mesh will exported.

Maybe in Cinema there is a similarly workflow possible...

The problem with Octane shaders in a 3dapp is, that we must submit the data.
Obj can´t handle it. Also we need a alternative scene format...

face

[abstrax]

I await your description of the problems w/this feature!

In general there are two ways you can bake a procedural texture:

1. You create for each exported material channel of each object a texture. This works fine, as long as the UV maps are set up correctly. The big draw back is the fact that you easily might end up creating hundreds or thousands of textures. Which a) takes a long time to compute and b) takes a lot of RAM.

In the following example the left cylinder and box use the same material with a voronoi noise in 3D texture space. The right cylinder uses a baked texture of the voronoi noise, that has been baked using the UV map of the cylinder. The same UV map is then used for the projection onto the right cylinder. The right box uses the same material of the cylinder, but has a different UV map and with that the material looks wrong on the right box. We would need a differently baked texture for the box:

2. You just bake the shader in the UV space 0,0 -> 1,1 (similar to the shader preview in the material editor). Unfortunately you usually don't achieve the same look as with procedurals, because you get seams and stretching and other unwanted effects, but the advantage is that you have to bake each material only once.

In the following example, the objects of the front row use such a baked material on different objects, while the back row uses the original material with the noise shader. You can clearly see, how the texture gets distored on the objects of the front row and how it's not seam-less:

-> The only way to achieve a good quality is to bake the stuff per object per material, which requires you to provide good UV maps as well as needs a lot of RAM in real-life scenes, where you easily get many many objects. That's the main reason, why I haven't tried to attack this problem yet. But I have put it on my TODO list and will have a look at it again sometimes in the future.

If you are really desperate, you can always bake your objects yourself.

Cheers,
Marcus

[colorlabs]

Thanks for this explanation. Makes a lot of sense now. I guess I'll figure out how to bake by hand for now...though what I like about the procedural stuff is that it's fast and easy to change, and allows me to be more creative.