Blender - Shadowbaking

[Carissa Claridge]

This is regarding the typical mesh plane behind/beneath every furniture/decor piece in Secondlife.


I know how to bake the shadow etc,  with a lamp or light! and then bake shadow,  BUT!!  That is not the question today

MUST we use lamps/lights to bake shadow?
I want to use JUST my HDRI to light&shadow my object&shadowplane (((because faster))))

 but ... when I go to bake the shadow plane it's totally black if I do not use lamps

 

So my question is,  do we need lamps to bake a shadow?  is it not possible to bake the shadowplane from just hdri?

[Quarrel Kukulcan]

Try a combined bake with diffuse and glossy contributions.

[Codex Alpha]

Whether you bake your Ambient Occlusion map in Blender or Substance Painter, this part of the tutorial Meshing with Jack - Substance Painter to Second Life shows you how to prepare it with transparency for use in Second Life.

The portion timestamped is about processing the image in Photoshop to add the alpha transparency, etc.

 

Edited April 14, 2022 by entity0x

[Wulfie Reanimator]

My understanding is that you can't bake the HDRI lighting because it's camera/view-dependent, and that's why you need to use some external (camera-independent) light source when baking lighting onto the object.