Hey All, I’ve been writing some tools that let you manipulate a shader in Maya and bake it down to a map. I have been using the convertLightmap command to bake out the textures but it doesn’t give much control over how the textures get baked, where they end up, or what name they have. I know that a lot of that could be remedied by just editing and moving the resulting file after its rendered but that seems like a really ugly solution. Do you guys have any good solutions for this sort of problem?
A workaround might be using the Transfer Maps tool (or command).
Use a poly plane with a UV covering (0,0) - (1,1) as target, turn on transfer in UV space.
This way you should be able to bake your object surface to the surface of the poly plane.
The advantage is you can bake diffuse and shading, and you can set file target locations and file type.
Only drawback is that transfer maps can be quite slow.
Sven