Final Gather Bake Script - Non-Animated Lights
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This particular script was developed for more "everday" use of Final Gather. Specifically, it is designed to bake out a FG map over a frame range as long as the FG lights/materials do not change in color or intensity. If your FG lights/materials change over time, this script is not for you and you should check out my other scripts here for that. By baking out static FG, you can easily reduce final render times by 50%.
This version is simple enough, the only things you'll likely need to change is the incriment rate that you want the script use. Lower incriment values will cause the script to add FG data/points to the .fgmap more frequently (because it is using more frames) while larger incriment values will skip more frames. Regardless of the incr value, the first and last frame will always be baked out. One thing to note is that this version creates a single .fgmap (unlike my other method) and over the course of a frame range, more FG lighting information is added to this single file. Also note - if you have a fast moving camera or objects, you will need to make your incr value smaller to be able to create lighting data on all of the surfaces throughout the entire frame range.
Other than that, it's pretty straight forward to use. Simply import and source the Python script like your normally would (see Step 2 on my other page here if unsure how) and execute it with whatever values you want to use for:
first = Starting Frame
last = Ending Frame
incr = Incriment: "Use Every incr Frames"
cam = Camera Name for Bake
Finally, if you didn't set up a FGmap to use before you run this script, it will use the scene name by default. If however you have already set up a FGmap name, the script will simply continue to use that map.
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