Baking - some fisrt thoughts

[prehabitat]

Last point from me

I've used Inventor Publisher; not sure if you have access to inventor plugins (ie the Octane for Inventor plugin by Paul) but it can handle quite a few different file formats:
123D, DWF, DWFX, DWG, FBX, JAM, IPT, MODEL, SESSION, CAPPart, CATProduct, FBX, SKP, IGS, IGE, IGES, JT, PRT, OBJ, X_B, X_T, ASM, SAT, SLDPRT, SLDASM, STP, STE, STEP.

BUT; its material handling (of Revit exported DWGs, haven't tried the others..) is terrible... and the computation is massive... doesn't seem to be processor constrained; uses 1-5gb RAM and takes up to 2 hours (of 10-20% cpu load)...

The output is rather different than the ones generated by the simlab software to; the publisher PDF's are more like exporting a viewport (in all its raw, functional, unpresentable glory). however it does provide dynamic sectioning tools and some other stuff...
The simlab seems to give you the opportunity to construct the layout on the sheet, and the 3D part is just one of the viewports on that sheet layout...

I don't think the path from octane to 3D PDF will be via Inventor publisher (unless Paul looks into this and finds its the path of least resistance from his perspective)... but it is interesting to see how different the results are.
Wonder if we can get a 3D PDF tool for standalone... more likely will be from Max/Rhino... doubt inventor/Revit has the material handling ability to swap-out pre bake materials for post-bake...

I cant post the 3D PDFs I've mad up due to NDA, but I'll export a standard Revit family/model via FBX and see if one of the other formats retains material information at least...

[Micha3D]

If my 3D PDF doesn't show the content, than this is caused because 3D content is blocked by default and the Acrobat PDF viewer doesn't show a message used per browser. Saving the PDF to disk and open it will show the message and the 3D content can be enabled.

A few big projects are starting here now so I can't post so much here. But I'm glad to see that more users are interested to get this road.

Paul, a next step could be to add batch render for all bake textures.

The problem, that two versions of materials per object are needed - one of the unbaked input and one for the baked output needs some brain storming. Solutions could be:
* two versions of the scene are saved at different layers at the Rhino file or
* a baked display mode is added by the McNeel team with a baked texture slot that will be used in this mode only

An other idea for further development:
Problem: objects with fine details needs a very high resolution baked texture. Better would be, if objects could get a "baked lighting" channel that use the low/medium res baked lighting and multiply it to the material texture. So baked light texture wouldn't be high res. This method would be needed for the 3D PDF. If some one like he could speak with the McNeel and the Simlab team.

[prehabitat]

Update Micha's Greeblebox2.pdf is exactly the kind of output you get from inventor publisher...

Micha: can you confirm the same process/workflow was used on all three of your PDF's?