V-Ray Tip: V-Ray Texture Bake Checklist for Game Asset Export

Efficiently baking textures with V-Ray for game exports ensures fast real-time performance and consistent shading across engines. Here’s a focused, production-ready checklist to get clean, predictable results.

• Prep your meshes
  • Create high/low pairs with clean smoothing groups or locked vertex normals.
  • Unwrap a unique, non-overlapping UV set for the low-poly; reserve a second UV set if you plan to bake separate lightmaps.
  • Keep texel density consistent across assets that will sit next to each other in-engine.
• What to bake (typical PBR set)
  • Albedo/Base Color (no lighting, no AO multiplied).
  • Normal (tangent-space for dynamic lighting; object-space for static props only).
  • Roughness and Metalness (ensure correct inversion if your source uses gloss/spec).
  • Ambient Occlusion (separate, to multiply in-engine if needed).
  • Curvature/Cavity (for edge wear, masking in texturing apps).
  • Height/Displacement as 16-bit if you need parallax or offline detail; often converted to normal for games.
  • Emissive (separate pass) and, optionally, a static Lightmap for baked lighting workflows.
• V-Ray baking workflows
  • 3ds Max: Use Bake to Texture with V-Ray output maps (VRayComplete, VRayLighting, VRayNormals, VRayDirt, VRayCurvature).
  • Maya: Use V-Ray’s bake tools for selected objects and output individual passes per target texture.
  • Leverage render elements to drive consistent multi-map baking in one pass where practical.
• Normals and tangent space
  • Match your game engine’s tangent basis (e.g., MikkT for Unreal/Unity) to avoid shading mismatches.
  • Use a projection cage or controlled ray distances for reliable high-to-low transfers (preventing ray misses and skewed details).
• Quality and seams
  • Edge padding (dilation) of 16–32 px helps hide UV seams under mipmaps.
  • Supersample: bake at 2x resolution and downscale for cleaner edges and less aliasing.
  • Turn off unnecessary glossy/reflection subdivisions during baking to keep times predictable.
• Color management
  • Color maps (Albedo) in sRGB; data maps (Normal, Roughness, Metalness, AO, Height) in linear.
  • Save high-fidelity masters to EXR; deliver PNG/TGA/ TIFF at 8/16-bit as engine-appropriate.
• Packing and formats
  • Channel-pack data maps to reduce memory: e.g., R=AO, G=Roughness, B=Metalness, A=unused or masks.
  • Follow engine texture compression (BC7/BC5/BC1, etc.) and keep to power-of-two resolutions.
• Lighting options
  • Prefer dynamic lighting + AO for flexible scenes; use static lightmaps for large, non-dynamic environments.
  • Apply the V-Ray Denoiser on baked lighting passes for cleaner results at lower sample counts.
• Automation and validation
  • Batch your bakes and standardize naming with tokens for versioning.
  • Verify in-engine under the same HDRI/exposure to catch gamma or tangent discrepancies early.

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