Smart Maps Baking

[homam]

Hello all,

This post is about a plugin for baking maps for real-time applications (similar to RenderMap and Ultimapper in Softimage). Actually the plugin used them as a part of its process. The plugin drastically enhances the quality of baked textures (less pixilation and blurriness) without increasing the texture size and sacrificing game memory. I've used it very successfully in several game projects done with XSI and our in-house game engine and I would like to share my success story using XSI and this plugin

The plugin is based on an AI algorithm that captures many factors from the 3D scene/object in order to generate best baked results. If you are interested in learning more about the technical background, please refer to this blogpost.

I recorded a few cases with very low-res textures to show the differences easier:

Baking Lightmap with Global Illumination for Sponza
- Baked Texture Size: 1024x1024
- Number of Triangles: 110,324 triangles
- Processing Time: ~4 hrs



Baking Lightmap with Final Gathering for a City Proxy
- Baked Texture Size: 512x512
- Number of Triangles: 11,406 triangles
- Processing Time: ~10 mins



Baking Ambient Occlusion from Hi-Res to Low-Res Model
- Baked Texture Size: 512x512
- Hi-Res Number of Triangles: 77,280 triangles
- Low-Res Number of Triangles: 10
- Processing Time: ~20 secs



Regards!

[mc_axe]

This looks quite interesting, i bet is cool stuff for real time games.

but is it just an in house tool or we can get it from somewhere?

[homam]

Making it public is what currently the guys at IN|Framez are working on. Since it is more interesting for game devs, probably it will be published as a plugin to Unreal or Unity.
For XSI or other DCC, it depends on how much the community is interested in it ;)


Regards,

[jonmoore]

Very interested to see where this is heading. And not just for gaming either.

I work with an architectural client that has moved most of their visualisation budget into real-time engines. They still use offline rendering for high quality stills but no longer produce large scale animations as they prefer the immersive qualities achievable via the likes of UE and Unity.