I am researching Lightmaps and AO. In the SDK there is a workflow in MAX using the Arnold renderer. This is suppose to provide better AO.
There are lightmap features in blender and there are a number of addons to utilize lightmaps.
Would ASOBO @Yasmine be willing to add more SDK documentation to allow Blender users to take advantage of lightmaps and “bake lightmaps in the red channel” of the comp texture?
Reading over the AO documentation wrt Arnold, see potential to enhance Blender AO comp textures. But I am having trouble relating MAX speak to Blender speak. Parts make sense however other parts don’t seem to have corresponding Blender workflow/feature.
Setting the world background, separating parts is a workflow in Blender.
Scene prep creating one object per material - may/may Not be needed for Blender as some addons take care of this.
UV setup is also taken care of in some addons. Not sure I would need to scale up things 10,000 times.
The lambert material setup is something I don’t have in Blender - Labertian reflectance - how could we emulate that in Blender? Make a Blender material in a specific way using a diffuse texture/material?
You bake the lightmap images - output as hdr files (edit: ok that is dependent on addon - so png 16 bit can be exporterd). But,
“Once finished, you can go and add the newly baked lightmaps into the red channel of each corresponding texture.”
How is that done? hdr images are not easy to make into pngs (EDIT: ok addon dependent) and add to the red channel of the AO. Also What is the difference in the Arnold render engine and the Cycles renderer in Blender? Can it even be emulated?
Appreciate a response thanks.