I checked out bobo's vertex bake tutorial (http://www.bobotheseal.com/tuts_vertex_bake01.htm), and was wondering if the same thing is possible in Maya 6.0, so far google has not helped much, was wondering if anyone knows it's possible and if a good tutorial exists. Would be much appreciated!

Yep I use this technique all the time, create a shader and apply to your object, put some lights in the scene, select your object and open the hypershade, select the material you have applied to your object and then under edit use the "convert to file texture," open up the option box for the export options you want and it will save an image file of the baked light map to where ever your Maya project is set. After that bring the image into photoshop and use it how ever you like. Oh yeah and your uv's must be in the 0-1 range as light maps do not work if the uv's tile at all, you cannot have any overlapping uv's either or the light map won't know where to put shadows, if you are mirroring the uv's I suggest deleting half your model for the bake.

Also you can use mental ray to bake FG and GI to texture or to vertices.

Rendering>lighting/Shading>Batch bake ( mental ray )

[sorry for the derailing]
While we're on it, is there some "normalmapping" tool that allows you to do a normalmap-like render but with a lit model instead of normal vectors?

(for those who care, I got a set of scripts to do my vertex baking for Blender)

KDR_11k, isn't that what we just described above, lighting your model and baking out the light map with shadow and colour information? Maybe I don't understand the question? Wait I think I understand your question now, you want to bake out the lgiht map with the normal map applied so you get an even better light map, you might be able to just convert your normal map to a displacement map and then bake in Maya as described above. I have not tried that yet though. Other wise you would need some fancy tool to bake out the result of the normal plus the lighting, maybe mentalray has this feature?

I just meant that you take a UVed lowpoly model and a hipoly model and it renders the hipoly model to the lowpoly one so you get a diffuse map that fakes the detail of the hipoly model (replacement for normalmapping for engines that don't take dot3). Normalmappers can create a normalmap or an unlit diffuse map but I haven't seen one that can create a lit diffuse map.
This effect can be seen in Final Fantasy X, for example.

Ah, I guess I could write something that calculates a diffuse map out of a worldspace normalmap...

That's possible with Maya and mental ray as I described above only instead of baking to verts bake to texture. I did this 2 days ago. Took a high res model, baked out diffuse maps with radiosity lighting and subtle shaders, applied those to a low res in game model.
Ive yet to decide wether I prefer the results over hand painting it all.

Daz, I guess the problem would be you would have to uv map the hi res model first where as with the normal map you only have uv map the low res model. Or do you have a secret trick to bake the hi res model light map down to the low res model like a normal map workflow?

True. No, no secret trick here [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]