Quote - I remember a while back someone suggesting to place the texture on a flat plane primitive (scaled way up btw) and applying the shaders then rendering.  I'd imagine if ya messed around to have the lighting directly in front fully illuminating the plane and rendering with no shadows (at a big size I'd imagine) it would be pretty much the same as baked textures when reapplyed to the model....  might try messing around with this on the weekend.....

Gerard

 

It will be close, but not the same in all cases. The reason is that some of the nodes we use for noise-based effects, like Spots, Granite, or Fractal_Sum, are actually driven by the 3d geometry of the figure, and not by the UV map. The figure's nose actually occupies a much smaller area on the UV map than the similar sized sections of chin or cheeks. The reason is that the nose sticks out from the face, almost cutting in half the effective UV resolution. If you used Spots to bake on a plane, they'd all be the same size. But once you projected those baked spots on the figure, the spots on the nose would be bigger. Also, the 3d evolution of the pattern is different than the 2-d cross section produced by the plane.

But for a lot of effects, it wouldn't be bad.

Even better would be to generalize - instead of expecting the color map to do everything, make separate maps for freckles, moles, etc. Then combine these with nodes. If you made nice freckles re-usable then you could overlay them on any color texture quite easily, using Blender nodes or color math nodes.

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