[Bf-committers] Patch: baking to vertex colours

[Alex Fraser]

Hi all,

I have submitted a patch that allows render baking directly to vertex colours. The advantage of this is that it doesn't require a UV map, but the quality of the bake will depend on the resolution of the mesh.

    http://projects.blender.org/tracker/?func=detail&atid=127&aid=29035&group_id=9
    http://www.pasteall.org/pic/19692

It currently works well for all bake modes except full render, shadow and AO. Full render and shadow have the occasional black vertex, and AO has its values shifted randomly. Increasing the number of samples for AO fixes it, so I guess it's just unstable noise. Baking from selected to active works too.

Baking a modified mesh (e.g. subdivision surface) does not work; it will segfault due to the different number of vertices. Maybe the bake should just skip objects that use such modifiers?

Ton, you might be interested in the patch because it adds a new field 'origindex' to VlakTableNode, as suggested by Brecht. This maps from VlakRen back to the face in the source mesh. It is only populated when doing a vertex colour bake.

Any feedback on this patch would be welcome.

Cheers,
Alex