Another texture baking test using vray renderer inside of 3d studio max 2009. I tried to use gobo-effect lighting, like the use in live performances on stage and stuff or on shows like Jay Leno, so it is not smudged or anything (this is the actual lighting set-up). The only blurry thing is the quality of the baked texture (512×512), but its just a test anyway! Its so cool, when all the textures were baked and I re-applied them to the objects, I could rotate around in viewport and see my scene fully lit (without any lights!). You can see in the thumbnails, those are sceenshots directly from max:

Here is short animation, check out the render time per frame (2 seconds!) instead of 40 seconds!

This time, I did two steps:

Step 1: bake textures for all objects in the scene.

Step 2: render fly-thru animation.

Before baking, it took about 40 seconds to render 1 frame (800 x 480px), but with baked textures it took roughly 2 seconds per frame! Also, I didn’t even use any GI and lights to render the animation, because all the lights and shadows are baked in.

Next step, I want to learn how to incorporate this scene or different scene into real-time interactive experience, so that people can walk around instead of just watch the animation!