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.