Question about shading, and PSD output in Maya

Hello -

I've managed to start making sculpties in Maya, but now i'd like to get a 2 dimensional map of shading. I've played around a bit, and i've placed a directional light over my sculptie, and made a "lambert" shading (I think). What I want to do, I believe, is "bake" the shading as a texture, and then use the "Create PSD Network" option to save the texture to a PSD file. However, I don't quite understand how to go from shading to a PSD output. All I want is a map of the light and dark areas of the surface, the texturing itself i can do in photoshop.

A walkthrough would be invaluable!

Some may argue that this question really belongs on a Maya forum somewhere instead of here, since it's about the workings of Maya itself, not really about sculpties. I'm not really sure what the best answer to that argument is yet.

Anyway, don't bother with a PSD network. That's way too complicated for what you're trying to do. All you want to do is bake a few shadows, right? Check out this simple tutorial on baking with the Maya software renderer:

http://fromthehill.nl/tutorials/bake/index.html

Output the texture as a TGA, and then open it in Photoshop for editing. Simple.

With just the the Maya software renderer or with Mental Ray, the two renderers that come with Maya, you can do baking sort of okay, especially if you do cleanup in Photoshop afterwards like you're talking about doing anyway. However, if you're really interested in baking and you think you'll be doing it a lot, I'd suggest you invest in the Turtle renderer. It's designed from the ground up for exactly this. You'll find that there's a night and day difference in quality between an image rendered in Turtle and one done in Maya software or Mental Ray. Turtle is only renderer I know of for Maya that is specifically designed with real time environments in mind.

Of course Turtle also costs $1300, so only consider it if you're serious or if you're independently wealthy.

Thanks for the reply, that helped alot. Though the tutorial was a bit different than the current Maya (I'm on 8.5) it was still helpful. I did figure out how to get it baked, and yes, the output does leave something to be desired, though i think i could have enabled more options on the baking (and maybe crashed my computer too).

The baked version was helpful as a guide for shading, but in the end i ended up airbrushing over the baked shading anyway, to get a better result. Still useful as a guideline of "what goes where".

Hey I couldn't help but peak my head in here. Qarl Linden wrote an exporting script that not only creates the sculpted prim texture, but gives you the option to bake the texture with the current scenes lighting and shading. all just single click once you get his exporter script running.

the page to get all this is at the following url.

http://www.qarl.com/qLab/?p=49