Blender: Baking light (lamps) and shadows??

[Mikki Miles]

I'm somehow familiar with baking AO now, but really would like to bake the light of the lamps and the shadows they are casting to my textures (Blender 2.5). I can't figure out how to do that, is it possible at all?

[Poenald Palen]

In 2.49 you use full bake, use nodes on teh material and click the diff button in teh nodes window (make anew one to see it) and that will give you specular highlights (you get diffuse only with both turned on...sort of), and you then combine these in gimp with layer settings (um, add might work well...but you can choose/adjust this as you please) . But you might have to be changing lights settings, clicking on some things on the materials and may want to soften shadows and so on in the lights settings.

2.5 is not known to me for this stuff, but I thought it might have similar things since some things did not change to much, just the locations of things.

[Ashasekayi Ra]

Go to the Render Panel -> Bake -> Full Render

[Mikki Miles]

but that won't bake the lights from the lamps nor the shadows, just AO and environment light...

[Poenald Palen]

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Mikki Miles wrote:

but that won't bake the lights from the lamps nor the shadows, just AO and environment light...

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wow! really? OH, yeah. the same as what you see in 2.49. You select nodes for that material. Then you might have to choose the same material from a list, but I am not sure about 2.5.

Then just make a window area and change it to nodes view. and go check out the (most likely) two nodes bits you have. One is your material, the other is the output.

Go to the material one and leave Spec on only, turn off Diff or anything else. This will turn off all diff and only do the spec. But I don't know if you have this view in 2.5, I just don't use it much at all.

If you search for baking specular blender 2.5 you might get something in search. I don't have time to watch through the vids and check them all out lol.

[Mikki Miles]

I don't want anybody to do a search for me. But none of the sources I found gives an explanation why baking works for AO, but not for the lamps and shadows. But at least there's a little chance that somebody here says something like "it's not possible at all" or "it's possible, but..."

Excuse me for bothering you.

[Gaia Clary]

The problem is that you can invent millions of possible scenarios how to keep(!) Blender from doing what YOU want. And i also think that if you realy want to get good (and reproducible) results from Blender, you have to learn a bit about how to setup up the system.

Yes, there are tons of tutorials and sometimes it takes a bit to find the one that gives you what you need. But in general it is a good thing to just "learn how to work with Blender" independent from what you want to achive right now. And that will take some time.

So (for me) guessing why you can not bake your lights is somewhat like gambling. I am 100% sure that your issue is something that can be solved within a few minutes when the blend file where available for inspection...

Well, you could try this:

 

• reset blender to its default setup (you don't need to store as default)
• ensure that your lights are all on the same layer (or all layers which contain elements for your bake are selected)
• ensure that your lights are setup correctly (e.g. casting shadows or not...)
• Take care that your object is good illuminated (i often use an area light or a sun to illuminate the scene plus some spot lights depending on what i want to get)
• ensure that your object is selected
• ensure that you have a working UV unwrap
• ensure that your materials are setup (e.g. receiving shadows or not...)
• make a test render with your camera. By this you ensure that your object is correctly lighted (enlighted?)
• finally make a full bake

Sorry for such a long list, but you must be prepared to learn a lot before you can get out the results that you WANT.

 

[Mikki Miles]

thanks for your effort and your time, Gaia!

My scene with the lamps rendered fine, it just didn't bake to a texture. In the meanwhile I found out, that baking lamps/shadows AND AO won't work (it may not make any sense at all...)

Having AO unchecked helped.

[Rage Riptide]

Saw this at SLU a while ago.

Bake specular highlights

Something like this using the node editor. Node editor is cool.