HOW DO I BAKE TEXTURES WITH REDSHIFT IN CINEMA 4D?

Bradley Strong, New Zealand

- Mike Griggs

Mike Griggs replies

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.