[Bf-gamedev] Cycles baking workflow

[Dalai Felinto]

First for those not following the latest Cycles development here is
what is going on:

During the development we had an option to simply dump the baked map
in an external file, defined by a filepath. Prior to the merge in
master, we decided to hold on this workflow in favour of something
more aligned with Blender current design. I'll call it the "Active
Texture" workflow.

We are basically using the same criteria that is used in the Viewport
and for Projection Painting as to determine which texture each
material should bake. Some of the downsides mentioned in the
BlenderArtists thread are:

* You can't specify the final size directly (it depends on the images
you are using)
* Blender doesn't automatically save the images
* It requires adding new materials and Image Texture nodes for the

Note that, apart from the requirement of adding new materials, this is
the same issue one would face with the Blender Internal baking.

There are different ways of solving the "this workflow is bad" issue.
We can improve this workflow (e.g., we could have an option to
autosave the images after the bake). We can ditch it entirely (proven
that a new workflow is superior to this in all its aspects). We can
propose something that can live in parallel. Initially I was
personally in favour of ditching the internal saving :) but Campbell
helped me to see that it has some advantages that "external saving"
didn't have.

Either way, we need a solid proposal here. The rest of the email is
addressing your request for external saving:

Hi François,

You are not the first one to suggest having external saving back. In
fact due to popular request I'm keeping a branch in github with the
original external saving, to help those already requiring cycles
baking into production.

https://github.com/dfelinto/blender-git/tree/bake-cycles-external

That said, we should take the time to design a proposal on how to
tackle this eventual need. But I haven't heard a proper proposal other
than "please let's have external saving back" ;). Some things to
consider:

* How to handle multiple materials using different images (think of a
car where the wheel and the trunk are to be mapped to different
images, each of them taking the entire image area).

[in the branch this is what I called the "Split Materials" option]

* How to preview the result? I can see that the maps are a final
result, like a render, thus you often need them elsewhere. However to
have to open the image internally, and apply it to the active object
is not very practical either. Building a solution on top of the
"active texture" workflow gives you "for free" the viewport preview of
the baked map.

* How to re-bake separate objects without having to re-set the filepaths, ...

[part of this is handled by the "Automatic Naming" option in the branch]

As you can see some of those are better solved by using the active
texture workflow (for those not aquictanced with that, we are using
the same criteria that is used in the Viewport and for Projection
Painting as to determine which texture each material should bake).


Best regards,
Dalai
--
blendernetwork.org/dalai-felinto
www.dalaifelinto.com