BI: raytracing method: earning your bake

BI: approximate method: the cheap and dirty way This gives us three baking methods, each with a particular setup, that we will be exploring next: BI has two ways of calculating lights, an approximate method and raytracing. Enough words and let's go to an image:Ĭan you see how that white light in the front lights things around it? Can you see how the blue light bleed out? Isn't that awesome?!īlender has two rendering engines that we can use for this: Blender Internal (BI) and Cycles. They work best in low light situations and specially good with shadows enabled. It gives your model a more accomplished look. If the geometry of your ship is static (no rotating bits, sorry!) and if lights are static (sorry, no blinking lights!) then you should bake some glows.Īlso, baked glows look good. That's basically what glow baking is all about. In this case, we can use a rendering program and compute the effect of light on the scene (a process that can take a long time), store the information in an image and just use the image in our engine. However, the problem can be tackled pretty effectively if all objects are static. And you'll subconsciently notice that there's something funny going on on your image.

No game engine or hardware is able to duplicate this behaviour in real time currently. All objects receiving light become lightsources in turn. Once emitted, a light beam will travel in straight lines, bouncing from one object to another while been partially absorbed. The physics of lighting are pretty complicate.

If you have any doubts or problems, please feel free to point them out. This is not a modeling guide, so you'll need a correctly UVmapped model. It is a reflection of my own workflow, which is probably not the most optimized one in the blender universe but I can assure you that they do work. The objective of this guide is to give the community a simple step-by-step introduction on baking glowmaps.

Blender light beam