Hi, this tutorial will show you how to bake textures with shadows and lighting in complex scenes using Maya. Because maya software bake technique is pretty much rubish, i'll use Mental ray. This is mainly used in games, but its also very effective with animations. Baked textures can really decrease render time. When your lighting is set, and you don't plan to change it, and your test renders looks fine, you can bake it to texture or several textures. When your scene contains many objects, it's best to use several types of textures, or rather several sizes of textures. In this case I'm gonna use 2K texture for bigger objects first. Before you bake any texture go to mental ray globals an set it to something higher than preview preset for better results. Now go to LIGHTING and SHADING, batch bake mental ray, option box. In the first field select, "SELECTED" option, because you don't wanna bake everything at once. Then check shadows option if you want shadows to be baked. If you check, use bake set override, you can access texture bake set override options, where you can choose stuff like occlusion to be baked. In this case I want color and light, so in color mode i select, LIGHT and COLOR. Next you can choose a prefix for your texture file, to easily recognize it later. X and Y resolutions are the scale of the actual texture, in this case 2K or, 2048 in both fields. Last thing is to choose format. I prefer TIFF. Now, with object selected hit Convert. It can take some time, depends on the scene size and texture resolution. You can see the progress in output window. After converting all big objects, decrease X and Y resolution and start selecting the medium sized objects. For the smallest and more distant objects, like stones and rubbish, use 248 or 128 x and y resolution. In complex scene like this, it can take a lot of time, but after you're done it saves much more time and testing. The only problem is that you can't change the lights in your scene, however you can duplicate some textures and paint new lighting in photoshop.
