I was checking out this masterclass on Mantra rendering in H15 and something popped up that I have been trying to do for ages, baking to point colours, yeay! But I can't figure out how to it They never got to mentioning quite how in the vid and the docs don't seem to mention anything either… Any ideas?
@peteski: This is something that is on the roadmap for baking, however it is not currently supported in H15.0. The slides should probably be updated to reflect this fact.
As a workaround, you could build points from your vertices, coloring them with the result from a shader evaluation. This could be written out as a point cloud and loaded by an engine to get per-component colors. Or you could read the point cloud back in and assign values to an attribute (Attribute Wrangle). The final bake node would bake to attributes directly, but would be doing the same operation (evaluating shaders at vertices).
Thanks guys, Well that's a shame! Got my hopes up there. It's not only in the slide but it is mentioned too, so hopefully it's not that far away.
I'm a little reluctant to bake to texture and read those textures to verts as I'm pretty new to Houdini, also I can see some issues arising with hard edges (using that technique). Say you baked the lighting and colours of a cube, it wouldn't retain the hard edges since the verts would get the average of the lighting on each face. I'm guessing that's why they'd have baking to points and meshes as separate things. It was similar in softimage.
