Baking Light Maps for Game Environments in Maya and mental ray
In this tutorial, you will learn about baking light maps and compositing them for game environments. Software required: Maya 2011, Photoshop CS5.
What you'll learn
In this tutorial, you will learn about baking light maps and compositing them for game environments. You will learn to generate light maps for any project's environment, or bake ambient occlusion into our geometry. We will learn how to gain more control over the color and quality of our lighting by rendering in passes, compositing them, and making tweaks by hand as we go. Then we will be able to see our lighting in Maya's real-time display, rotate it at 360 degrees and view it at every angle fast and easy.
Table of contents
- Choosing a Sky and Creating Our Sky Dome 13m
- Breaking Down the Scene 12m
- Creating UV Layouts and Multiple Sets 9m
- Assigning Bake Sets 7m
- Ambient Occlusion Passes 12m
- Direct Light and Bake Shadows 16m
- Baking Global Illumination Using mental ray 5m
- Baking Final Gather with mental ray 6m
- Baking Vertex to Geometry 7m
- Compositing Light Maps Using Photoshop 7m
- Displaying Real-time Lighting 8m
About the author
A. Gabriel Betancourt began working in the computer graphics industry over nine years ago and has contributed his experience and talents to games, music videos, and commercials. He currently works with Monarch Games, a startup company for the mobile market. Before that, he was Senior Lighting Artist at Activision on the high-grossing Call of Duty series for Black Ops, World At War, Nazi Zombies, and Zombietron. His previous experience includes lighting and materials on Tomb Raider: Underworld fo... more