My C4D R10.1 freezes every time I try to bake Illumination and Shadows, and I’m still waiting for an answer from their tech support. C4D R10 worked great before, except that I couldn’t bake shadows into a complex UV map and have it successfully import into Unity. I always had to use a costly workaround that required a lot of performance optimization in Unity. In the meantime, I’m researching a lightmap alternative–namely modo. Does anyone here use modo to bake shadows into a complex UV map of a single texture and successfully import it in to Unity?
I haven’t used it for lightmaps till today but why don’t you just try it out on your own with the trial version? Rendering a texture is quite easy in modo.
Thanks, Taumel. I kind of realized that after posting this, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I tried it once in the past, but only with one simple UV-unwrapped texture, not a complex map. I seem to remember that it was fairly easy to use, pretty intuitive.
Those images really are beautiful. I think modo is adding some animation support, which it didn’t have in the past.
Thanks, Taumel. I kind of realized that after posting this, but I haven’t gotten around to it yet. I tried it once in the past, but only with one simple UV-unwrapped texture, not a complex map. I seem to remember that it was fairly easy to use, pretty intuitive.
<<<
Without actually trying it out i guess you really just render out the texture, and nothing more. Hardest part for me actually is still the uv mapping if it isn’t a physically defined object but there is hope for me as they again improved that for 301. ;O)
And by the way those were animations (301), no images. If you’re interested in nice stills then it’s really worth jumping in their gallery from time to time as they have some amazing artists using the tool.
Just to post an update on what’s happened since I wrote this post:
My texture baking in C4D is still freezing the program, but I’ve worked around it by baking the texture with Object Baking and checking the Illumination box. It creates a surface color map that works pretty well as a lightmap if I skip the use of any texture on the object. I’d never thought of using it before. When I also bake a texture into it, UV-mapped any way I like, I can create nice textural touches to the lightmap. So far, however, the textures are pretty low-res, so they only work as highlights on top of the main texture in Unity’s lightmap shader. (I can, of course, replace the low-res parts of the map with high-res in Photoshop, so that’s not really a problem.)
I also tried out modo, but wasn’t successful in doing complex UV maps coupled with baked shadows. That doesn’t mean that it doesn’t work, just that I may not know how to do it right. It took me a while to figure out how modo’s UV-mapping works.