Baking light from incandesence, maya

So I have been fiddling around with this a ton and have nothing to show for it so far. My goal is to give maya my selfillum texture and have it bake light that would be given off, then combine that bake with the selfillum texture for a accurate ambient bake. This seems like a easy and logical thing to me but my attempts have failed. So maya junkies, what the dilio?

Thanks, Bill

 

Bill, I just fiddled around with some settings and found that if you do a Mental Ray Bake and have the "Ambient Color" set to your "self-illum" texture it works like a charm.

Here's the steps...

Take your ship and select all the faces.
Do a face extrusion and turn "keep faces together" to On.
Extrude the faces outwards a little bit.
Separate these extruded faces into a new mesh using "Polygons/Separate".
Invert the normals of the new mesh.
Now you have an outer shell to bake the ambient color from.
Select the original inner mesh and Bake using Mental Ray "light only".

If you want me to send you a Maya scene using this method let me know. I think it should work for your scenario but I'm not positive... just did a quick test.

HTH

 

Hmm, cool idea extruding, we will have to talk. I would for sure like to see the example you did. AIM tonight?

Bill