8
140 Chapter 17: Rendering
devicessuchasgraphicsdisplaycardsorgame
engines.
You can render to textures using the
ment al ray
renderer (page 3–77)
Ty pica l Text u re Baki n g Me th o d
1.
Set up a scene with lighting.
Banana object in a lighted room
2. Select the objects whose textures you want to
bake.
Banana object selected
3. Choose Rendering > Render To Texture.
4. A
Render To Texture dialog (page 3–151)
appears. In this dialog, you choose which
elements (page 3–142)
of the rendering you
want to bake. Elements are aspects of the
renderingsuchasdiffusecolor,shadows,alpha
(transparency/opacity), and so on.
In this dialog, you can also choose various
display options (page 3–145)
for showing the
baked texture in shaded viewports.
Tip: If you have a Direct3D graphics display
driver, you can use
DirectX v iew port shaders
(page 2–1308)
to view the baked texture in
shaded view por ts. They show how the baked
texture wi ll appear on DirectX devices.
5. Click Render.
AfteryouclickRenderintheRenderToTexture
dialog, a number of things happen. (This is a
typical set of events; the dialog gives you a lot of
control over how texture baking actually occurs.)
• The elements you chose are rendered, each to
its separate bitmap file.
Lighting map of the banana
By default, the texture type is
Targa ( p age
3–683)
, and the element maps are placed in
the
\images
subfolder of the folder where you
installed the program.