In this article, I briefly explain ‘Texture Baking’ by Ambient Occlusion. I use Maya2016, and Turtle as Renderer.
The 3D object has been downloaded from TURBOAQUID .
Set the Turtle Renderer
Windows > Setting/Preferences > Plug-in Manager > Turtle.bundle
Check the boxes for Turtle.bundle and press ‘Close’. That’s all you need to set the Turtle Renderer.
Ambient Occlusion
What is ‘Texture Baking’?
Direct light + Indirect light (Ambient Occlusion)
You can bake the shadow by the lightings onto the texture, you could reduce the data size and the time for the rendering.
Set Ambient Occlusion
Firstly, switch to the Rendering mode. Then, with all the objects to bake selected,
Lighting/Shading > Assign New Bake Layer (TURTLE)
Adjust the parameters by the Attribute Editor (ilrBakeLayer).
Set ‘Back Ground’ to grey.
Set the parameters as follows.
Tb Res X: 2048
Tb Res Y: 2048
Tb Edge Dilation: 1
Vb stands for ‘Vertex Bake’, and Tb for ‘Texture Bake’.
Check the ‘Custom Shader’ checker-board icon to open the ‘Create Render Node’ window.
Surface > Ilr Occ Sample
Go back to the ilrBakeLayer tab and check if ‘Render Type’ is set to ‘Texture’. In this example, I set ‘Tb Image Format’ to Targa, but you can change it on demand.
The setting for Rendering
Render > Render Settings
It opens the Render Settings window. Set ‘Render Using’ to ‘TURTLE’, and ‘Render Type’ to ‘Baking’.
Set the parameters as follows:
Min Sample Rate: 0
Max Sample Rate: 2
You can change them when needed.
By exporting the image with those settings, you can get the texture with the effect by ambient light and indirect light. To apply it, press the ‘Ambient’ checker-board icon of the object, and select the image created by the texture baking.
By the way, you can also combine the image by the texture baking and the texture of a pattern such as cloth on Photoshop.
In that case, place the layer of the texture-baked image on the texture of the cloth. Then, set the blending mode for the texture-baked image to ‘Multiply’ to combine them.
（Reference: AREA JAPAN Maya Learning Channel）