So in an effort to lessen my dependence on the PC workstation I have and go mobile with my macbook pro, I've been looking into various options on the mac that support a streamlined texture baking workflow.
Right now, I use Maya on the PC with turtle renderer. I generally work with numerous objects that each have their own UV setup (sometimes different UVs for normal, spec and diffuse). When the texturing work is complete, I create a global UV set for each object titled something like "lightmap" and auto arrange all UV shells from all objects in the 0-1 UV space on the "lightmap" UVset. I then instruct Maya to take all the rendered images from the other UV sets and bake them all down into the lightmap UV set.
With turtle this was dead easy. Unfortunately it's not available for OSX.
I'm trying to find an alternative on OSX that can do what I need well but coming up short so far.
It was suggested before that I just go with mental ray for maya on osx but mental ray is a mess. You have to do 100 times the work to get what you need and even then it's hard to achieve decent results. I would love to give Vray for Maya a shot but if the mac plugin forum is any indication, that's never going to happen.
I hate having to use Bootcamp - it just breaks my workflow :(
Right now, I use Maya on the PC with turtle renderer. I generally work with numerous objects that each have their own UV setup (sometimes different UVs for normal, spec and diffuse). When the texturing work is complete, I create a global UV set for each object titled something like "lightmap" and auto arrange all UV shells from all objects in the 0-1 UV space on the "lightmap" UVset. I then instruct Maya to take all the rendered images from the other UV sets and bake them all down into the lightmap UV set.
With turtle this was dead easy. Unfortunately it's not available for OSX.
I'm trying to find an alternative on OSX that can do what I need well but coming up short so far.
It was suggested before that I just go with mental ray for maya on osx but mental ray is a mess. You have to do 100 times the work to get what you need and even then it's hard to achieve decent results. I would love to give Vray for Maya a shot but if the mac plugin forum is any indication, that's never going to happen.
I hate having to use Bootcamp - it just breaks my workflow :(