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144 Chapter 17: Rendering
Lighting—
When on, the diffuse render element
displays the color of objects after lighting has been
applied.
When Lighting is turn ed off, the element displays
the diffuse color of objects before the lighting gets
applied. For textured objects, this will look like
a3Dprojectionofthetexture.However,objects
with a single color will look “flat ”.
Rendering to Textures
Make sure the def ault scanline renderer or the mental
ray renderer is the active renderer. > Select one or more
objects. > Rendering menu > Render To Texture
Rendering to texture, or "texture baking,” allows
you to create texture maps based on an object’s
appearance in the rendered scene. The textures are
then “baked” into the object: that is, they become
part of the object via mapping, and can b e used to
display the textured object r apidly on Direct3D
devicessuchasgraphicsdisplaycardsorgame
engines.
You can render to textures using the mental ray
renderer (page 3–7 8)
Ty pical Textur e Bakin g Met h od
1.
Set up a scene with lighting.
Banana object in a lighted room
2. Selecttheobjectswhosetexturesyouwantto
bake.
Banana object selected
3. Choose Rendering > Render To Texture.
4. A Render To Texture dialog (page 3–156)
appears. In this dia log, you choose w hich
elements (page 3–146) of the rendering you
want to bake. Elements are aspects of the
renderingsuchasdiffusecolor,shadows,alpha
(transparency/opacity), and so on.
In this dialog, you can a lso choose various
display options (page 3–150) for showing the
baked texture in shaded v iewports.
Tip: If you have a Direct3D graphics display
driver, you can use DirectX viewpor t shaders
(page 2–1464) to view the baked texture in