Hello. I need to bake environment light texture into a uv object texture. I think I already tried all planes that baketexture ROP offers, but none of them seem to do what I want to achieve. What other options do I have?

Hi,

just a thought (if I understand your setup correctly): Is it possible that Houdini does not really “see” the environment texture at all, only probes it at rendertime? Or, in other words, is it possible that the environment does not come as an OBJECT with a UV-held texture map to begin with?
If this assumption is correct, would it be possible to “convert” the environment (probably a HDA of some kind) into an actual object and THEN “trace”/bake the texture?

Another idea (if there is a clean way to do this, just ignore my brainstorming): Could you render a few (virtual, i.e. later unneeded) camera projections onto your object, thus bascially creating your own “baking setup”? The idea would be to have something like 8 or more cameras setup around the object you want the environment “baked” on, render a view through those cameras, create a UV map “from camera view” for a proxy object, that would then get the render output assigned as texture (for the UV map created previously) - et voila, you have a “real” object with “real” UV and texture, from which a normal bake should work.

/Brainstorming

Marc

Hi @malbrecht, you're right about the setup. It's an object (or group of objects) with environment light and/or some lights added to the scene. The idea is to bake the beauty pass and/or pure lighting into a new texture of a uv object/multiple objects.

For now I ended up doing it in Cycles, and it's super easy there (my thanks go to Andrew Price for his tutorial about light baking in Blender: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sB09T–_ZvU [www.youtube.com]). However, I would like to stay in my comfy Houdini zone, instead of having to export it to Blender just to bake those maps. Although…, as I'm used to KISS principle, I wouldn't mind jumping from program to program if it wasn't those long times of waiting for saving and loading highres Wavefront files in each one of the programs.

I do appreciate your brainstorm about the cameras, but it seems slightly over-complicated for this task. At least after the first read and when compared to Blender's virtually a “one-click” solution. I hope you understand and won't get angry on me.

Hi,

thanks for the feedback, really appreciate that someone in this forum “pings back”!

Obviously, ANY “more-or-less-one-click-solution” is better than the approach I outlined above (it just happens that I use a solution like the one I described for a different scenario, so I know it to work). I wonder if it *was* possible to use Mantra (or RS or whatever) to grab environment texture - just out of curiosity.

(I just wish that Blender was compatible with me. It always seems like that tool has a lot of potentials (almost like modo before it got foundried) - one day I will find someone I can pay to teach me how to make productive use of Blender)

Marc

@malbrecht, I've been trying to reproduce your idea about that camera rig, but I got stuck at the step where I am to project uvs from cameras.

Just as a reminder:

(…) create a UV map “from camera view” for a proxy object, that would then get the render output assigned as texture (for the UV map created previously) (…)

I used UV unwrap SOP to project uvs from each camera separately and piped it into a switch (pre-bake scripts handle the switching). I ended up with eight rendered images with little idea on how to stitch them together into original uv of the proxy (which, if I'm not mistaken, should be the same as uvs of the mesh that I want to bake the beauty pass into). I'm certain that I did not fully understood the concept and as a result I'm doing something terribly wrong.

It would be great if you could elaborate a bit on this step when you have some time.

We have a similar history with Blender because it was very incompatible with me too, and many times throughout the years I tried to convince myself to use it. 2.8 changed that. Eevee is so beautiful. UI and overall user experience is also much better than it was in 2.79-. If there's a time to give Blender a chance it's when 2.8 is released as a stable version. Not just yet (in its beta state), because I already experienced problems with some function names changing from build to build (and thus my custom hotkeys ending up broken and in need of rebinding). It won't replace Houdini, but it does pretty damn good job of complementing it (especially in traditional modeling aspect and, hey hey, light baking ;)).

Cheers,
Artur

Hi, Artur,

I apologize for being confusing - unfortunately, I am not at liberty to go into the full depth of “step 1, step 2, step 3”, but I will send you a private message. You seem to be 95% there

Marc

Blender: I heard good things about 2.8 - now I just have to find someone who is not a hardcore Blender evangelist but only interested in getting jobs done, then I can probably add Blender to my toolbox. The only real pain that thing is causing me is that it does not seem to offer a real API (C, C++), only some Python, minimizing its use in number-crunching-pipelines.

malbrecht
You seem to be 95% there

The thing is that this last 5% likes to take up 95% of the time spent on asset production.