Hi all,
I’m trying to get more familiar with texture baking in Houdini, particularly normal maps. The good news is that one of the recent builds fixed normal map generation in the Bake Texture ROP.
However I’m still having some workflow questions/issues:

1. The Bake Texture ROP’s UI is pretty confusing, to me at least. How is Extract Image Format under that first Outputs tab supposed to work? What I’m doing: Leave Extract Image Format as the default Targa. Check one or more outputs, like Curvature for example, and hit Render to Disk. I end up with a .rat file that includes curvature as an extra image plane, but no curvature .tga has been generated. Also, checking Tangent Normals on this tab alone does nothing, it doesn’t get added as an image plane in the .rat file unlike the other output options under this tab. Checking Extract Image Planes under the Images tab and selecting Tangent-Space Normal there does output a targa though.

2. What’s the difference between enabling, say Occlusion, under the Outputs tab, versus enabling it under the Images tab via checkbox, versus adding and extra image plane with the plus button and selecting Occlusion from the drop-down menu?

3. How do you render *only* the normal map without taking the hit for surface shading? I thought adding diffuse to Exclude Light Paths under the Unwrapping tab would be the ticket, but no luck. I tried adding a constant shader to my models for quicker renders, but that yields a blank normal map.

4. Finally, is there a way to approximate “cage” functionality? I haven’t had any luck with the basic beveled box scenario.

Cheers