CINERENDER: export procedural maps to bitmap files

[leceta]

Is it there any way to export procedural maps generated by cinerender to a bitmap file?

this would be very helpful in order to use those bitmaps in Image Fills or OpenGl materials

[alemanda]

I'd try to render a slab with the chosen material in a top view projection, trying also to have a neutral light. Then save the picture as bitmap.

[leceta]

Thanks, alemanda, nice trick, but far from being ideal...

Would be nice to have a option to export procedural maps in custom resolution, this would be super handy to create custom texture maps usable with fills and open-gl materials.

[Benji_W]

I agree wholeheartedly, and would like to bump this topic.

With as powerful as the Cinerender settings are for generating procedural textures, being able to use a rough approximation of those generated textures within the 3D workspace (we frequently show and revise our residential projects with our clients present in the 3D viewpoints) would be tremendously helpful.

Might be wishful thinking, but my dream is to be able to click "Update Basic Settings (From Cinerender)" and have it export a small bitmap to the basic settings, with the all of the Cinerender channels baked in. No more Blender, no more Photoshop. Might even indirectly cut down on the file size of my loaded texture libraries.

[Laszlo Nagy]

But how could this be achieved?

The bitmap image generated by a procedural shader is random, there are no repeating parts in it. How can that be saved as a bitmap file which will be tiled, so it would have to be saved in a way that its sides nicely join to form a continuous pattern?

[Benji_W]

Oh, I could be mistaken. I was under the impression that the procedural shaders were all tiled in a unified frequency. I didn't realize that they were randomized infinitely. I had the brick and tile shaders in mind, but I'm not certain how effects like noise or anisotropy behave.

What I was more or less suggesting is that it would be great if there was a way to bake certain channels together into a simple bitmap image. Namely: color, bump, normal, diffusion, and alpha (if they are able to be tiled, that is).  Many PBR textures that you find include an albedo texture, a bump/displacement texture, and etc., but none of these can be used in the 3D window as an accurate representation of the final render. I need to go into Blender to compile them together and export a bitmap. Then if I want multiple colors, I need to preemptively do color alterations in photo editing.

Not a huge deal once you get a system going. But every now and then we have a client who wants to compare colors in the 3D window – "Can you show the lap siding in Rapids Blue?" – and we unfortunately have no fast way of doing so. 

I do, however, realize that this is probably an unusual workflow. We're experimenting.