Help with Shader Baking

PaulGaertner_6e5e02e7

Hello DAZ experts,

can somebody give me a hint on how to create baked textures?

Here is what I want to achieve: I have bought some beautiful rock models for DAZ studio. I want to render them in 3ds Max. Unfortunately they have a complicated surface which consists of many layers with different maps (5 layers alone for diffuse, I think). 

I see that there is a "shader baker" tab and I thought this would allow me to reduce this to a single jpg, or maybe a few jpgs (like diffuse, bump and specularity) that I could then use in 3ds Max. But I can't get it to work. In fact, it does not seem to be doing anything at all. 

Here is what I did (see attached pic):

• I selected the rock in the scene tab
• I switched to the surface tab, then to the Shader Baker subtab
• I set the resolution to 2048
• Then I tried to set the image path. The folder selection dialog opens, I select a target folder. I expected the target folder name would now be displayed in the "Image Path:" edit field, but the edit field remained empty.
• Then I clicked on "Bake". This causes a popup to open for a split second (too fast for me to read). Other than that, it seems to do nothing.

What am I missing? Or is my expectation unreasonable? Maybe there is some documentation or help video? All I could find was the Shader Baker page in the DAZ Documentation Center, which did not help me. Any help is very much appreciated.

 

 

 

Richard Haseltine

The path box stays blank for me too, but it does in fact save an image. Do bear in mind, however, that baking everything down to a single map will remove many of the opportunities for the surface to nteract with the scene lighting - also bear in mind that, as I recall, not every shader is bakeable.

PaulGaertner_6e5e02e7

@Richard: Thanks for verifying that the path box stays empty.

I tried with a different object today. This time the popup did stay open for 20 seconds and an image was created. It was totally black.

Then I tried again with the rock from yesterday. The popup closed almost immediately (I can't read what it says) and no image was created.

So it looks to me like either the feature is buggy, or there are some rules to this game that I don't know. I would like to learn those rules.

 

 

 

Richard Haseltine

Did you have the render engine set to 3Delight? I thought my first attempt was black at a quick glance, with Iray, so I switched and that did give some colour (though darker than expected).

As I said above, it is my understanding that shaders do require soem set-up to work with Shader Baker though I'm not sure of the details.

PaulGaertner_6e5e02e7

@Richard: Thanks for your patience. I indeed had set the render engine to iray, since the material wanted to bake was an iray one.

Setting the render engine to 3Delight and choosing an object with a simple material, I was able to produce a baked texture.

However, not for the material that I wanted to export from DAZ to start with. So it looks like it's not possible to bake an iray material? Or maybe it is possible, but requires inside knowledge. Maybe someone has some pointers how to do the setup that Richard mentions?

As a last resource, I can always try to rebuild the material in the Max material editor from the raw textures, but that is a difficult undertaking.

Again, thanks for the help.