Contents
Overview
Starting with 23.3, RenderMan can bake integrator results to images or points clouds.
Potential applications include transferring pre-computed global illumination for real-time realtime playback or optimising render times for large static assets.
Limitations
The current implementation comes with a number of important limitations:
- Baking is non-incremental.
- This limitation excludes integrators that can not be setup to render in a single increment, like PxrVCM.
- PxrPathTracer, PxrDirectLighting, PxrOcclusion and PxrVisualizer are compatible.
- Baking is incompatible with curves.
- Each baking display can use at most one RGBA display channel.
- Use multiple display drivers to output multiple signals.
- No breakpointing / stop-and-resume during baking
- There is no separate irradiance output
As a workaround, we suggest baking illumination and albedo: dividing the illumination by the albedo gives the irradiance.