Expand Cycles to use the new baking API in Blender.
It works on the selected object, and the panel can be accessed in the Render panel (similar to where it is for the Blender Internal).
It bakes for the active texture of each material of the object. The active texture is currently defined as the active Image Texture node present in the material nodetree. If you don't want the baking to override an existent material, make sure the active Image Texture node is not connected to the nodetree. The active texture is also the texture shown in the viewport in the rendered mode.
Remember to save your images after the baking is complete.
Note: Bake currently only works in the CPU
Note: This is not supported by Cycles standalone because a lot of the work is done in Blender as part of the operator only, not the engine (Cycles).
Documentation:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Bake
Supported Passes:
-----------------
Data Passes
* Normal
* UV
* Diffuse/Glossy/Transmission/Subsurface/Emit Color
Light Passes
* AO
* Combined
* Shadow
* Diffuse/Glossy/Transmission/Subsurface/Emit Direct/Indirect
* Environment
Review: D421
Reviewed by: Campbell Barton, Brecht van Lommel, Sergey Sharybin, Thomas Dinge
Original design by Brecht van Lommel.
The entire commit history can be found on the branch: bake-cycles
This can for example be useful if you want to manually terminate the path at
some point and use a color other than black.
Reviewed By: brecht
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D454
This to avoids build conflicts with libc++ on FreeBSD, these __ prefixed values
are reserved for compilers. I apologize to anyone who has patches or branches
and has to go through the pain of merging this change, it may be easiest to do
these same replacements in your code and then apply/merge the patch.
Ref T37477.
* Added a Ray Depth output to the Light Path node, which gives the user access to the current bounce.
This can be used to limit the maximum ray bounce on a per shader basis. Another use case is to restrict light influence with this, to have a lamp only contribute to the direct lighting.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Nodes/More#Light_Path
This is part of my GSoC 2013 project. SVN merge of r58091 and r58772 from soc-2013-dingto.
environment map, by enabling the Panorama option in the camera.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Doc:2.6/Manual/Render/Cycles/Camera#Panorama
The focal length or sensor settings are not used, the UI can be tweaked still to
communicate this, also panorama should probably become a proper camera type like
perspective or ortho.
By default lighting from the world is computed solely with indirect light
sampling. However for more complex environment maps this can be too noisy, as
sampling the BSDF may not easily find the highlights in the environment map
image. By enabling this option, the world background will be sampled as a lamp,
with lighter parts automatically given more samples.
Map Resolution specifies the size of the importance map (res x res). Before
rendering starts, an importance map is generated by "baking" a grayscale image
from the world shader. This will then be used to determine which parts of the
background are light and so should receive more samples than darker parts.
Higher resolutions will result in more accurate sampling but take more setup
time and memory.
Patch by Mike Farnsworth, thanks!