HOW DO I BAKE TEXTURES WITH REDSHIFT IN CINEMA 4D?
Bradley Strong, New Zealand
Redshift in Cinema 4D allows lightning-quick, Gpu-powered renders. Still, like everything with computer graphics, even it can slow down when textures become complex. Also, not all 3D artists use Redshift or Cinema 4D for that matter, so how does an artist create texture assets that are efficient and easy to share? The answer is to bake textures using the Redshift baking toolset.
So what is ‘baking a texture’? Usually, a material or shader on a 3D model is reacting to the lights and environment it is in. Baking creates a texture file that embeds all the sophisticated shadows and light falloffs into the texture file so that it can be applied to a simple model. This technique is common for game engines where it can also be used to preserve details on low-res versions of models using normal maps. The Redshift Bakeset tools work with the Redshift AOV manager so that reflection, diffuse and specular maps (amongst many other texture types) can be created. Plus, Redshift allows the creation of custom AOVS. An artist can export practically any part of the texture set of a model in an image format that can be quickly loaded into other 3D capable applications.
Animated textures can also be baked, and as the Redshift baking tools are GPU powered, they can create the baked texture maps in a fraction of the time of Cpu-based methods.
Baking textures allows Cinema 4D’s and Redshift’s sophisticated noises to be mixed with nodal tools, like the Color Layer node. Baking frees up the need for this complex texture to be calculated on every frame. For example, we could bake a texture with all of the shading information,
like lighting and specular qualities, for the background of a room with an object in the middle. Baking means all the calculations that were required to render the background room elements are no longer needed. This means quicker renders, and the artist can concentrate on lighting the hero object in the middle of the room without it interfering with the background.
In this example, I will demonstrate how to capture the colour, lighting and shadow of a model into one texture and then apply that to a simple Cinema 4D standard render object.