Cycles baking, yes or no?

[VanillaSunsets]

Ik have been taking a pause from creating for SL for a while, now feeling the tingling urge again to start messing around in Blender again. This time I decided to be hip and work in Cycles Render, you gotto learn sometime, right...?

Now it takes some getting used to, up to the point of small frustrations and the feeling I better return to Blender Internal, bet you have been there. But, hey, I am not going to get Cycles scare me away! I am getting better at it, no more noisy renders and I killed the fireflies:matte-motes-evil:

Still, I think I need to and should be able to optimize this process and make it more "fun"! The things I still dislike are the fact that I cannot see my baking in real time. In the Internal Render I could see the image being baked and that saved time. Sometimes you only need 5 seconds to see the bake is not the result you wanted to achieve and I would kill the baking process. In this engine I have to wait till the progress bar reaches 100% to see the result. Is there some setting I missed?

I have had troubles with light in the scene, my baked textures seem way too dark. Is the a way to optimize a scene for general use in SL?

Baking seems much slower in general coz I have to set the samples pretty high. Maybe there is a way around that? 

Are the any settings in general that differ a lot from the Internal Render that I should change?

I know these are a lot of questions and I am sure more will pop into my head even after I finalize this post so any advice, trick or hack is very welcome! I am sure I am not the only one that is overwhelmed by the Cycles Render Machine:matte-motes-agape:

I realize Blender to SL is very unique pipeline, so I can accept it if Cycles just is not ready or never will be for SL targeted creations. I will (and as I feel now, gladly) return to Internal Render and just be happy to have mastered it a bit for the future!

[Sage Waverider]

I've used to bake my stuff with maya, which is really broken and difficult, I gave Blender another chance sometime this year, and since them I use it for all my content,  From my expierience there's no point in using Cycles for SL's content, basiclly results are uncomparable with Mental Ray even If you leave it to render overnight with high samples. So for me Internal Rendered is just enough for me.

I've just created another thread which questions the way SL handles baked content (appearing too dark and so on) and IMO until SL engine will get an update (which might never happen since LL is focussed on Project Sansar) we as content creators shouldn't hope for decent up-to date realism, SL is terribly outdated and that's the sad truth...

[VanillaSunsets]

I agree that the term outdated comes to mind a lot, yes. That goes for documentation as well :matte-motes-smug:

[Chic Aeon]

The simple answer is YES!

 

 

Cycles is fantastic (after the learning curve) and it works wonderfully in SL (again after the learning curve). It took me almost a year to REALLY get Cycles doing what I wanted it to do. Now it is much fun and I can pretty much get exactly what I want without a ton of effort.

 

Here are a couple of hints about things you asked.

Do a test bake at 20 samples. That goes quickly and you can see if everything is baking (I usually have several materials baking onto one map) AND if the lighting is going to be OK. I later bake at 400 these days but I have a hefty computer (bought in part for Cycles work).

 

LIGHTING is key. It takes awhile to get the feel of that and get your personal default lighting set up. It will depend a lot on what you are making (furniture, houses, etc) and how large things are.

 

I have a lot of Cycles info on my tutorial list (most from last year so I won't stand by all that info as I was still learning LOL) but there are also some newer screenshots from this year in my Google Plus feed here:  https://plus.google.com/u/0/100190052320604204973/posts

 

Here is the Cycles Specific list: https://plus.google.com/u/0/100190052320604204973/posts/45DDHkUnGvZ

 

So there might be some info there that is helpful.

 

Note that there are a lot of videos on YouTube on Cycles == many were also experiments and while going through the tutorials will likely be helpful you will probably find your own way .

 

As someone said when I started to learn Cycles Spring of 2015 -- its like leveling up in a computer game. That is a very astute comment it turns out.

 

Good luck. Keep going. Have fun.

[Sage Waverider]

Yeah, keep going - give V-Ray or Mental Ray a chance, if it's possible... I love Blender and Cycles, but these guys blows Cycles to pieces.

[VanillaSunsets]

I never realized you did tutorials but now that I found them I will dive into them! Ty for linking me to them. The reason I do not want to give up this easily is that I know Cycles gives me much more control over my materials and I WANT that, lol. After failing badly at making Blender Cycles spit out a texture that I can define as near to perfect ( I am too demanding for my own good...) I started to think maybe Cycles was just good for renders and not (yet) for baking. I do love to study and learn but I was afraid I was wasting my time on a "dream".... 

My computer can handle a high number of samples so no problem there. I mostly make small decoration and furniture, much easier to make textures for then large builds or houses, so in that way I consider myself lucky :smileywink:

Ty for giving me some hope and inspiration. I will keep at it, bake in Blender Internal for a bit longer while I learn Cycles on the side till I master it to my satisfaction! 

[VanillaSunsets]

I used both those render machines, but that was years ago. I do remember they were fun to use too. I will keep them in mind, I kind of forgot about them, lol.

[Chic Aeon]

Yes, buildings are tougher to light -- hence tougher to bake. You sometimes need to compromise (yes, I hate that too) and since making a house full many 1024 textures isn't the best choice IMHO, sometimes textures can't look as good as they COULD if we had unlimited power (or if more folks did really as I can load a lot of 1024 textures without an issue .

 

Keep at it. I can honestly say it is MUCH FUN now. And I can honestly say it WAS NOT at the beginning LOL.

[VanillaSunsets]

Spend the better half of the day checking tutorials on your Google page and on You Tube. Some video's I have seen before that were abracadabra to me back then are starting to make more sense now. Reminding me of learning Blender for the first time, it was like that, watching hours of video, re-watching, getting slightly depressed, thinking I'd never learn and give up. Giving it a day or two and diving back in head first to discover I was starting to understand the basics and after some time even the more complex aspects. Those were the days :matte-motes-big-grin-squint:

I am now in the process of (re)watching and filtering ot outdated stuff and trying to focus on what will work for the Blender>SL pipeline. Also what will work for my kind of creations. I am looking at settings and am working on a light setup that will work for most my creations. It is still trail and error, lots of errors, lots of starting over and over, lol.