Overview
RTTGroup is a Autodesk 3ds Max plug-in which is intended to replace limited render to texture built-in capabilities of the 3ds Max itself.
Render to texture (sometimes called texture baking) is a process of creating new materials (textures) for selected objects based on the objects' appearance in the scene with the respect to the lighting, shadow casting, opacity settings, materials and any other parameters affecting the final rendered appearance of a surface of object.
The resulting textures can be later used for texturing the same objects in real-time simulations (like 3D games or architecture visualisations), which can't afford for complex operations necessary for achieving many visual effects like lighting and shadowing with many light sources and objects' self illumination and light casting.
RTTGroup significantly expands the standard render to texture functionality.
It allows for grouping objects which are targets for render to texture process. Each of such groups can have its own set of parameters defining a mesh unwrap mapping, and number and sizes of resulting textures.
The RTTGroup's built-in automatic mesh unwrap mapping algorithm is very efficient and easily manages to correctly unwrap even complex meshes and tries to achieve an optimal texture space usage.
Thanks to the grouping feature and automatic parametrised unwrap mapping tool RTTGroup is the ideal tool for creating lighting and shading textures (lightmaps) in complex scenes used later in computer games.
Games which use the textures rendered with RTTGroup can display images with advanced lighting and shading created with techniques requiring significant computing power like radiosity or raytracing.
Requirements
RTTGroup works with 3ds Max version 6, 7, 8, 9, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 and 2012 (32-bit and 64-bit).