This mode actually bakes outputs of an integrator. It will be mainly used to bake diffuse global illumination but it can bake any light path expression too.
The illumination baking settings overrides only a subset of parameters of your scene's render globals. If your current scene renders as expected, these are the only settings you need to bake.
The main purpose of this menu is to validate your setup before rendering and warn you if an incorrect setup has been detected.
2D Maps
3D Point Cloud
As usual, you create a pattern with tokens to create named AOVs, but with a twist. The default file pattern is:
<scene>_<user:bakingIdentifier>_<aov>.<ext> |
user:bakingIdentifier
is a new attribute you can find on all bake-able shapes in the RenderMan section of the Attribute Editor:
It defaults to <shapepath>
so that each object gets a unique file name where the "|" character is replaced by "_", which is what you want when you bake to 2D images.
If you want to bake to a single 3D point cloud, you should remove <user:bakeIdentifier>
from the file name pattern.
Select the global baking resolution. Larger resolutions take longer to render.
All objects will be baked at the same resolution. This is a limitation of the current implementation |
Point clouds are baked in world space and their density depends on the shape's dicing density. Select here the global dicing density for the scene.
You can override the dicing density per shape by setting the Dicing Strategy to worlddistance and entering a different Dicing Distance Length. |
Select an integrator and its settings. We recommend PxrPathTracer.
Some integrators like PxrVCM and PxrUnified are incompatible because they rely entirely on incremental rendering to accumulate samples and resolve illumination over time. Baking runs the integrator once per point and it must be setup to deliver good results in a single increment. |
For best results, you need to increase the number of direct (light samples and BXDFs samples) and indirect samples enough to get reasonably clean results. The best settings are very scene-dependant and may require experimentation.
As usual, you may set the max diffuse and specular depth.