Texture Baking Modes

Flatiron offers two different methods that can be used to bake multiple scene objects into a texture map: Single Pass and Multi Pass.

Single Pass

In this mode the objects are baked into the texture map at once in one single render operation. This is usually significantly faster than using Multi Pass since the renderer does not have to be initialized repeatedly and many of the necessary calculations have to be done only once and don’t need to be repeated. This is the default mode used by Flatiron. Some renderers have limitations in this mode due to the feature sets they support. When you need features that this mode doesn’t support or when you get rendering errors you might want to use Multi Pass instead.

Object specific settings (like ‘don’t cast shadows’) can currently not be considered when using Single Pass mode with old versions of VRay (older than 1.50SP4a) or Brazil. VRay users are advised to update their renderer to the most current version to make full use of all available Flatiron functionality.

Multi Pass

Multi Pass baking bakes every object separately and combines them into a single texture map. This is slower than Single Pass baking and can cause issues with some image formats (especially when rendering in high resolutions). Depending on your specific requirements you still might want to use Multi Pass baking instead due to any of the following reasons:

• If you want to use object specific render settings with older VRay versions or Brazil you need to use Multi Pass mode.

• Multipass allows you to let different machines in your renderfarm render separate objects for your map in case you want to reduce render times but have problems with distributed rendering of a single image.

• Depending on your specific scene setup and renderer configuration you might get missed raycasts in some cases which cause reduced quality in the bake results. In that case Multi Pass rendering might result in higher quality renders.