koobas.hobune.stream
Lightmapping, Beast, mental ray, vray, baking : what all these stuff mean ?
Hi there, I am new to these stuff and I can't distinguish the difference between them...
I know that I can "Bake" the rendering of an object as texture in maya (is this correct ?), does this mean that I can render an Object in maya using Mental ray and bake the result as texture ? what about Beast and Vray ? what about Lightmapping and it is the same proccess as what I can do with maya ?
A lightmap is a texture map containing lighting information. It is (usually) precomputed offline, not during real-time gameplay -- in other words, it is "baked". Mental ray is a high-end rendering package used for rendering scenes to images. Mental ray is integrated with Maya as the de facto standard rendering. Mental ray produces film-quality output, and can be used to render (bake) lightmaps, but has many other features as well. Beast is another rendering package, which has been optimized for lightmap generation and also for use in games. Beast is integrated with Unity for creation of lightmaps. Vray is yet another rendering package, and is integrated with 3DS Max.
Spend a little quality time with google to find out more. Good luck!
Can I bake the rendering of an object in maya to a texture and use it in Unity3d ? and does this mean that Beast produce only the shadows and make them as part of the original textures ?
Beast can bake out the lightmaps independent of the (diffuse) textures. I'd start with Simon's link to Unity lightmapping and go from there (I'm no expert on this).
