mental ray baking

# 1 04-06-2006 , 06:34 PM

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Hi there all,
Lately, I have been working on my 1970 Dodge charger, which I am focusing on using for a game. As of right now, I am working on the alloy's, which I have created a chrome technigue that I learned from watching the Ferari remastered video. Basically rather then creating 50 million nodes to create chrome, the person in the video uses one blinn shader with the right settings, and also turned on final gathering. So to make a long story short, I was able to get the right looks for what I am looking for when I render it, but when I try to bake it with Mental Ray's batch render, it just comes out shinny but nothing got reflected. Now from reading what the maya help files say to do, it says that all you have to do is to select the object(s) and then go to Lighting/Shading -> Batch Bake (mental ray) -> option box and set your set your settings and click convert. I did that but, all I get is shinny the part of it without the refletions. So how do I get the reflections to work so that the alloys look like they are made out of chrome?.

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# 2 05-06-2006 , 03:08 AM

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ok, what gives? While waiting for a reply I have been also doing a test to see if I could bake my car paint. However, after baking, the texture becomes a flat lifeless red color.

So what am I doing wrong?

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# 3 05-06-2006 , 06:17 AM

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Ok,
I found out after searching on Alias newsgroups at google, I that other users where almost asking the same question, with the answer that you can not bake reflections, specular color, or bump maps. Nevertheless, some users say that you can use the environment ball as a workaround and map an image to that. In addition, they also said another trick you could do is to render out your scene in mental ray to save the reflection of that scene and then map that onto the environment ball. So with that being said, my next question is this...

If I would like to render the reflections and specular colors of my scene, so that I could use that as an environment map, then what would be the best way to make an environment map in Maya. Meaning, should I just create a dome and have the car reflect onto the dome, or should I render different angle shots, and if I should render different angle shots, then what angles should I set my camer to?

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# 4 05-06-2006 , 09:13 AM

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I'm not sure exactly what you want to achieve with this. Can you clarify why you want to bake the maps etc.?

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# 5 05-06-2006 , 04:28 PM

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Well mostly because I am new to how environment mapping works, so I am not sure if my method would be the best route. So that being said, let me clarify my end results of what I want.

What I want is to have a nice car paint color that has some nice specular color and reflections bouncing onto my car as well as having some decails such as stripes going down the middle of the car and have a number painted on the side doors. Now this could be a lot simpler if I was just going to render this as a display case, but what I am trying to do is bring it into Director 8.5 which be exported to shockwave. However, with shockwaves limitations, it does not support reflections. Do you have any ideas that could do to work around this?

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# 6 05-06-2006 , 04:54 PM

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right, so what you want to do is to bake the reflections into the car texture and then export that. So you need to setup the environment sphere so that it has the environment to reflect onto the car all setup. You then need to hook up the reflected colour of your material to the shader you are using.

then you should be able to use the convert to file tetxure in the hypershade to turn it into a texture that will have it burnt in. Failing that I'm not sure I've never had to do this maya before.

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# 7 05-06-2006 , 10:21 PM

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pureMorning,
I really want to thank you for the help. What I did was, I created my textures Photoshop as normal, and then applied it to my car. Then I used the environment sphere with a crappy image that I found on the internet, and connected it to the reflected color attribute of my blinn. Then I applied it to the body of my car. Supprisngly, even with the crappy internet image I was able to still pull-off a half decent job. If you like to see the results I am placing it in WIP board. Also I don't mean to double post, but I just thoght that wilth your aswome help I am now ready to move on and start showing off my work. So I hope I hear from you in their, and thanks a million dude.

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# 8 05-06-2006 , 10:49 PM

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no problem, I've checked out the render and I would say you need to turn up the antialiasing and also fix the UV mapping on the 2nd door.

good job though, glad you learned something

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