[Feature Request] Bake to vertex colors (Blender 2.92)

Naxela / The_Lightmapper

Fast and easy baked GI Lightmaps for Blender and Cycles

GNU General Public License v3.0

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[Feature Request] Bake to vertex colors (Blender 2.92) #65

Open HeyItsLollie opened 3 years ago

HeyItsLollie commented 3 years ago

https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/2.92/Cycles One new feature coming to Cycles in Blender 2.92 is the ability to bake directly to vertex colors (a feature that was previously available via Blender Renderer up to 2.79). One of the more common use-cases for this is to bake AO and indirect lighting directly into mobile assets — though being able to bake entire lightmaps to vertex colors has its uses too!

This is maybe a bit of a niche feature, but it'd be great to have access to this via The Lightmapper.

Naxela commented 3 years ago

Hi, thanks for the suggestion!

I'll keep an eye out for this feature, and I'll probably implement in after I've finished the combined lightmap and AO mode. I've added it on the to do list.

goodstout commented 3 years ago

Thanks so much! I'd get a lot of use out of this feature. Great work so far

Naxela commented 3 years ago

Hi,

Just some progress update on this - I've added preliminary support for vertex color baking although after using it for some time I realized there might be another more effective way which doesn't use Blenders internal way of doing it, but that's something for me to implement in the future. In any case, the current implementation works well, but doesn't use any denoising or filtering. It can be accessed by selected vertex colors from the menu panel:

It works especially well on vertex intensive objects, such as plants:

(Example with ordinary lightmapping, due to using UV the leaves doesn't look too great with low resolution):

(Example with vertex lightmapping, works well on leaves, but less on flat surfaces due to no denoising):

I hope this feature proves useful!

goodstout commented 3 years ago

This looks fantastic. Thanks so much for taking the time to implement this feature. I'll try it out soon and be sure to send you some results.

HeyItsLollie commented 3 years ago

Thank you so much! Excited to play with this ✌

tmcthree commented 1 year ago

Hey, I was looking for this feature too but the build target dropdown only seems to allow you to set an image texture as the target. Has the feature been removed?