How To: Bake a Cycles 4D Material to a Texture Map

It is now possible to bake a Cycles 4D material to a bitmap. To do this, the following steps must be followed.

Select an object

In the object manager, select an object, which must:

• be a polygon object (not a primitive object such as a sphere or cube)
• be a single object, not a Cloner or other generator object
• have a Cycles 4D material applied to it
• the active render engine must be Cycles 4D

It is the material on this object which will be baked to a bitmap.

The scene must be lit to do this: just as with any render, the absence of light will result in a plain black image.

Open the Bake dialog box

From the main Cycles 4D menu, choose 'Bake...' and this window will appear:

Choose the required options

Type

This drop-down menu allows you to select what you want to bake. The default is 'Combined' which simply bakes everything. But you could select 'Emission', for example, to only bake light emitted from an object.

Save

The file type used when saving the bitmaps. Choose the required format from this menu.

Path

The folder where the bitmaps will be saved. If this is left empty the baked textures will still be rendered in the picture viewer.

Resolution

The size of the baked bitmap.

Channels

These all refer to the various ray types. For example, if you only select 'Direct' the bitmap will be baked using only direct lighting. You can select whichever rays are required for the baked image.

Bake...

Click this button to start the baking process.

Stop

Click this button to stop baking.

Bake the texture

Once the various options are set, click the 'Bake...' button to bake the material to the picture viewer. If you entered a path in the 'Path' field, the resulting files will also be saved into that path.

Notes

Baking is dependent on lighting. The bake process will bake shadows as well as lit areas, so for best results, make sure your lighting is even and lights all parts of the object to the same degree. You may want to temporarily hide objects which cast shadows on the object, or which result in ambient occlusion with the object or reflect light onto it.