David Reinhold

The camera parameter on the Bake Texture ROP also gave me hope that this was supported. I used this feature in a another software for texture memory purposes to “hack” heavy renders by baking everything to a flat shader in a small studio once. It's wasn't physically correct because other objects reflecting these objects didn't get the correct reflections, but it made some really huge scenes manageable texture wise. Think about baking 4-6 8 k maps down to a single combined one in the resolution of what you actually need for that specific shot.

Could be something worth adding as an rfe before they add texture baking to Karma.
Thanks for the insight guys this was super helpful.

What an interesting reason. I hadn't considered that. Also I just found out that the reason I wasn't get lighting was because of the vm_uvlightpaths (“Exclude Light Paths”) which are -diffuse & -volume by default. I already had vm_bake_skipcf (“Disable Lighting/Emission”) disabled, but had missed the other parm. xD

So I guess other software/renderers that work with this feature are able to separate the render cam position this reflection is using from the output render pixel, but mantra assumes they are the same (which also makes sense somehow). I'm pretty noob at shaders and rendering haha

Hey guys,

I'm trying to figure out how to bake some lighting information to texture hair cards. I got pretty Far with the BakeTexture ROP, but it doesn't seem to support baking reflections. I stumbled across this thread [www.sidefx.com] while trying to find a solution, but the example scene that brianBurke posted there throws and “Unable to evaluate expression (Undefined variable (/out/dispbake/soho_diskfile)).” Error when trying to bake.

Just to be clear, unlike that example scene, I'm really looking to bake scene lighting information including direct illumination, indirect illumination and reflections.

Looking into this, some people were talking about a mantra -u command which would be able to bake lighting, but I couldn't figure out how to implement that or if it was still supported.

Any help would be greatly appreciated! In addition to hair cards, being able to bake lighting of the scene has a ton of applications for optimization of heavy scenes, so I think this is interesting to a lot of people.