[Bf-gamedev] Cycles baking workflow

[François Roussel]

Hello to all the subscribers of this list!
Here is a mail I sent to Dalai about the Cycles Baking feature. And he asked me to send it here too :


I’m contacting you regarding the Cycles baking tools for blender that you developed.
I’ve already participated to the thread on blenderartists.org (as FR64) but as a new member, my posts are still moderated and often get published only a few hours after writing them… So it’s possible that you didn’t see what I had to say regarding some needed improvements.

So first, a big thank you for developing this much much needed feature for Blender.
Now I have to say a few things about the current workflow, which is in my opinion quite bad. It really lacks 3 important things and two of them were present in the first builds of your branch :
- External saving of baked images (and the ability to automate this process with scripting).
- Output at custom resolutions (useful for generating low-res first renders to try things out, or lightmaps at lower resolutions than tex maps)
- Feedback (some renders are very long, and it’s good to know where it’s at or spot some errors before rendering is finished)
I also want to add that passes must not be in a menu, but as a list of checkbox to mix desired passes in a one shot render.

Actually, for the game project I’m working on, the current baking implementation is counter productive not to say useless. I say it again, it’s for me a regression compared to the first builds which output options were really fine.
To show you how I’m working, I put on a server my workflow test file. It’s quite a quick and dirty mess but it’s totally representative of the technical constraints I’m currently facing.

//The link for the file was here but I prefer to keep it private for the moment.

In this zip archive you’ll find a blend file with a small 3D world and all required textures ready for one click baking. The goal is to import this 3D world in a game engine (like Unity) with baked textures at 4K, or keep the original textures and mix them with baked lightmaps at 1K or 2K resolution.
So all objects are unwraped and textured, ready for generating baked images. I hope that by playing with this project you can better see what I mean.
I was panning to use vray and had a quite good workflow with it. With some very simple scripting I was able with one or two clicks to set render resolution and bake all objects at once and let it work during the night. All the resulting baked images were automatically saved to the unity project folder and ready to go. I’d really love to have the same workflow with Cycles which is way much simpler despite it’s slower, that was already possible with the first builds (which got me completely excited back then).

As you’ll see in this project. Working with baking is not convenient as texture maps are at 4K resolution so any baking is also at 4K which is quite a pain for quick previews and checking if everything is rendering fine. I also don’t know in which way it’s possible to automate the baking of multiple objects and sending the results in the desired location.

Sorry for being exigent as you already have done a tremendous work on this feature, but in it’s current form it’s not right and will not get you all the recognition you really deserve.

I hope you can continue your work and make the baking feature one of the biggest Blender's strengths as without this feature Blender will be kept out the video game business.

Many thanks again for what you've already done! And tell me what you think about this.

Best regards,
François Roussel
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