Cineversity

I need to bake textures that include global illumination without nasty artifacts.
Ideal .jpg size would be 1024x1024 for each texture output.

I’ve been studying lighting and can achieve good renders when activating global illumination and ambient occlusion in the physical render settings. The renders themselves looks great. However, when I go to bake object, the resulting texture includes a lot of artifacts that make the texture unusable for my .glb export.

I’ve read that adjusting the sample quality parameter is the best way to resolve this issue and get best quality global illumination results. However, my adjustments simply do not translate from the renderer to the baked texture output. No matter how high I raise the value of samples for GI, the resulting texture has very apparent artifacts. I’ve also tried exporting these textures out to 8k with no avail.

I’ve been testing GI bakes for the last 2 days with different values in sample quality, but the time consumption has gotten the best of me; thus, I ask for assistance here.

Is there something I’m missing when trying to bake out global illumination? Does global illumination simply not translate into a baked texture? What would be the best alternative route to achieving nice, realistic looking lighting without having to deal with GI? Or is there another setting in the GI panel I should be adjusting to have the bakes result in cleaner pixels?

Thank you for any help you can provide.

Here is a link to a .zip with the cinema 4d file, along with the texture’s the bake function outputs. Also included are some reference images. https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EcDSLqcK8vGzuav-O2IhjlVmZnzm19UW/view?usp=sharing

Hi stevenpaulhoward,

(Sorry for the later reply, but last night I got a lot of 503 and 504 error screen instead of the forum)

Thanks for the file and for using Google Drive. I missed, however, all the textures.

Since I write in a forum, I will be more detailed and explain more than you might personally need.

The main light source is pretty much the floor in this example. So yes, I know it’s the sky/sun mixtures. But exactly that is the problem here. If your camera is inside, that is easy to figure out. With a scene like this, not so much in terms of baking.

I have converted the “Physical” sky object into a spotlight (Sun has no falloff here!) and an HDR map.
I would place a plane object as a floor there and bake it first. This will deliver better light and decrease the need for bounces.

With these few steps, I got better results.

When I read 1024 jpg, my first thought was, perhaps, for SD resolution, not for anything higher.

The parts in your UV map will get around 512 pixels then. The rule of thumb is that textures should be at least 1,5 times higher in resolution than the size in the final render, given when they have the most screen space.

This means the vertical elements will not allow for more than 350 pixels. So if they are fully covered, at the moment you get closer, it falls apart.

My suggestion, render in 8k and 32bit/channel and then reduce it accordingly to the use. Of course, even this will not hold the water for all camera moves, but at least it will cover most views. If you know the results of the camera, that is easier to determine.

From my point of view, jpg is a delivery format and has no place during production. Furthermore, it is an 8 bit/channel gamma-based format. So nothing really can provide information that is stable against banding.

Here is the part that I would add or exchange.
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/PiLXBLb5rXSI5h1aFI5j6VNpe42qYDHRJoQbPCaxBil

If you place a light source on each bright spot on the floor (a little bit above), perhaps 30% brightness, you get cleaner results, of course. Inverse square to 1000cm)
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/H1Fi0FB9BFur3QAyP2wS9C9612LwW7nJsK8ESYUwb65
Since the floor is set to Luminance, it will only affect the other parts.

Yes, the manual could be better with this theme. There is pretty much nothing about the correlation to any other setting. Sorry about that.

All the best