Baking

The texture baking system lets you extract lighting information from a Mesh’s surface by using its UV map to generate a texture that can be mapped back to the mesh later.

In OctaneRender^®, texture baking is implemented as a special type of camera that, in contrast to the Thin Lens and Panoramic cameras, has one position and direction per sample. The way these are calculated depends on the input UV geometry and the actual geometry being baked.

For each sample, the camera calculates the geometry position and normal, then the camera generates a ray that points towards it using the same direction as the normal, from a distance of the configured kernel’s ray epsilon. Once calculated, the ray is traced in the same way as it would do with other camera types.

Mesh Requirements

In order to use a mesh for texture baking, it should be set up to fulfill the following requirements:

The mesh should contain at least one UV set. In the case of AlembicAn open format used to bake animated scenes for easy transfer between digital content creation tools., you can use up to three sets.
There should not be different geometry primitives mapped to the same UV region. Otherwise, you will find artifacts due to overlapping geometry.

Getting Started

Assuming you’ve already created a scene that contains geometry, lighting, material information, etc., the easiest way to get started is to create a copy of your render camera and replace its Octane Camera Type with a Baking camera (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Setting the camera type to Baking

Baking Camera Parameters

Figure 2: Baking camera parameters

Baking Group ID

Specifies the baking group to bake. By default, all objects belong to the default Baking Group number 1.

UV Set

Determines the set of UV coordinates to use.

Revert Baking

Flips the camera directions.

Size

Specifies the number of pixels added to the UV edges, similar to padding.

Edge Noise Tolerance

Determines the tolerance to keep or discard edge noise.

UV Region Minimum And Size

Specifies the area that the baking camera takes into account. You can pan and zoom in and out of the camera in case your UV geometry is not within the 0,0 - 1,1 region.

Use Baking Position

If you use a baking position, camera rays are traced from the specified coordinates in world space instead of using the Mesh surface as reference. This is useful when baking position-dependent artifacts such as Glossy or Specular materials.

Position

Camera position for the position-dependent artifacts, such as reflections.

Backface Culling

Determines whether or not to bake back facing geometry. This option is active by default.

Baking Group IDs

Add objects to specific baking groups by changing their Baking Group ID in the Octane parameters tab (Figure 3).

Figure 3: Setting Baking Group ID numbers in the Octane parameters tab

The Octane parameters tab is not attached to a scene object by default. You must add it to an object by selecting the object and clicking the +ObjParms button in the Octane shelf (Figure 4).

Figure 4: Adding the Octane object parameters node to a scene object

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