STEP BY STEP BAKE A CINEMA 4D MODEL WITH REDSHIFT
01 CONVERT TO STANDARD MESHES
Ideally, the Cinema 4D model needs to be broken down into simple objects. Here I have taken a parametric object, the sphere and used the Create Object command to convert it to a Polygon Object. I also used this technique on a cloner object and then Connect Object and Delete to convert the Box Arms into a Single Object.
02 CHECK UVS
Make sure each object has a working UV map. Switch to the UV layout and select an object to see its UV map. Baking works with no overlapping UV islands, and Cinema 4D makes this easy with its robust set of UV unwrapping and packing tools. The packing tools can optimise a UV map for specific resolutions; here the textures will be baked at 2,048 by 2,048 pixels.
03 ADD A REDSHIFT BAKESET OBJECT
Next we need to add a Redshift Bakeset Object, available in the Redshift menu. This allows artists to set the texture output size, where the textures are to be saved and what type of UV convention is required for the texture output.
Meshes are added to the Objects panel of the bake object and then by pressing the Bake button, the textures are created. Cinema 4D displays the progress of the bake in the bottom-left corner of the screen.
04 USE THE AOV MANAGER TO CREATE TEXTURE MAPS
For Bump data that can be used in Cinema 4D, we need to use the Bump Normals AOV. This generates a texture map that can be used in the Normal tab of a standard material with the Object method dropdown selected.
Remember, a beauty pass can capture all of the lighting, whereas a Diffuse colour AOV will only capture the colour of the actual shader. Therefore, using a beauty pass as a single map for noncritical objects in the far background is recommended here.