Intro to texture baking

Our goal is to make a material on a model work without any light source, in other words, self illuminate, but retain realistic shading.

For this intro to rendering to texture, use the default scanline renderer.

Start out by assigning a checker map to your model and using unwrap uvw to straighten all the uvws.

Light the model to show some shading. Lighting is critical here as this is what we are going to base out output on.

From your checker material, go standard and select shell material

Select your  model and hit 0 ...

There are various elements you can render. I selected CompleteMap, which will render the shadows onto the diffuse map.

[Note – the element shadows renders out only shadows cast on the model]

Hit render from the bottom of the render to texture dialogue:

The map navigator will now have show the diffuse map was automatically added to the baked material diffuse slot:

Lets test our work and see what we did. Activate the original material:

Now, turn off all the lights;

Turn up self illumination to 100

Render the viewport. There is no indication of shading or lighting whatsoever, all we see is the self illuminated diffuse map in the model.

Lets do the same thing with the baked map ... keep the lights off ... and now, activate the baked material

Set the self illumination to 100 the same way; the shadows are successfully baked into the model:

This can become a useful part of your workflow if you apply a procedural or other material to your model in max, the bake the texture, and develop it in Photoshop.

This war bird has a mental ray arch & design metal template applied to it (the mesh already has UVW's laid out) ... the texture here is baked out the same way as the cylinder above:

In Photsohop, I can now upen this file and make edits ... for example, beveling this part of the wing:

Then, resave the image file, and make a new standard map in Max with the updated image in the diffuse slot:

It will not be perfect, but it can give you a nice start on your texture. Note the bevels on the wing struts. There is no longer a procedural map involved, so this is suitable for game art.

Here is the texture baked material I made for a car mirror, with the standard max material metal chrome. This is a great way to get started on painting metal.

I can now open in Photoshop and add the mirror, bolts, hinges, etc.