To make 3D products & models look more photorealistic, it’s important to add physically accurate light and shadows. Light baking will help you achieve this effect.
Default Shading in BRIO
When viewing objects in Augmented Reality, your mobile device will modify colour temperatures on the model to match the lighting in your environment. This will automatically add some realism.
In addition to that, BRIO uses PBR shaders for surface textures. This includes an ambient occlusion shader, which helps define & darken occluded or concave areas of your model for more realistic lighting.
Real-Time BRIO Scene before baking
Enhanced Shading in Ultra Render
For enhanced shading, BRIO offers Ultra Render: a physically accurate path tracing engine. Ultra Render simulates full spectrum occlusion and colour bounce between objects and light sources. This can generate perfect photorealistic results, but is not supported on mobile devices.
What is Baking?
BRIO also provides a process known as “Baking” which stores the result of the lighting simulation produced by Ultra Render into a texture map (2d image).
Real-Time BRIO Scene with baked lightmaps
Baking in BRIO will automatically combine the colour from any imported diffuse/base colour texture on your model with the physical light simulation resulting in a more photo-real result.
Baked lighting in BRIO greatly enhances the look of your models and runs extremely fast on mobile AR devices.
Using Baking Maps
After the baking process completes the result will be stored in your texture Library for you to manually assign to any shading channel. You also have the option to download the results.
For augmented reality, add this baked texture to the base color/ diffuse shading channel before you publish your scenes.
If you plan to render using a web 3d version of your models you can add this texture to the Direct Diffuse and Indirect Diffuse shading channels of the BRIO material stack.
UV / Model Preparation
Since baked lighting defines a unique lighting simulation per Texel ( pixel ) on your mesh, you need to be sure that UVs for your model do not overlap. If you have overlaps the baked results will overlap causing visual errors.
If your model has only 1 UV set then make sure those UVs do not overlap prior to baking into BRIO.
If you would like to use overlapping UVs as part of your texture workflow, this is fine but you need to make sure to create 2 UV sets prior to import into BRIO. For example, your UV set 1 can contain overlaps but UV set 2 needs to have all of the UVs for all objects non-overlapping.
Baking Tips
*Hidden objects will not be considered in the baking process. You can use this to your advantage to bake multiple maps for different regions of your scene.
*A tip is you can create "occlusion only" objects that do not have any UVs just for the baking process. For example, you may use this workflow to casts shadows on objects within your scene. To do this import any mesh without any UVs(delete them in your 3d modeling software) and use this in the baking process for extra shadowing.
*When you add additional objects into the scene from the Brio Library or from disk keep in mind that would cause overlaps in the UV stack. The overlaps cause artifacts in the baking process. This will be addressed in upcoming versions of BRIO.
*Alternate the Visible while Baking option ON/OFF for each bake.
Follow this process for the best results in BRIO Baking.