Light mapping in Maya

Hi, I have access to Maya 6 and Mental Ray and would like to use them to create light maps for scenes. I need the lightmaps to be placed on a separate texture so that they are similar to the light maps generated by Maplet. I have searched the Internet and it seems that it can be done, but I can't find out the steps required. I'm still very much a novice when it comes to using Maya and any help would be very much appreciated.

Cheers,

James

James,

Check out www.3dbuzz.com for their Maya tutorials (they are in video format and are fab, but I dont know if they cover lightmapping).

IPete2.

Thanks for the link. Those tutorials look like they could be very useful for learning Maya in general. Unfortunately it seems that there aren't any tutorials there that cover light mapping though.

i would search their help system (which is huge) and look for "bake texture" or "bake lights" or something similar.

i think :)