Texture Baking.....What?

[Penry]

Can someone please explain to me, in plain english please, what the hell texture baking is and what it's advantages are. I have looked on the web for an explanation and just get geek jargon that makes no sence to me!

[Clifton Santiago]

You might have to explain what you mean by plain english...

I think I only speak geek jargon.

[rpc212]

Texture Baking is when you "bake" the textures and lighting of an object into it so it can imported into a real time game engine or real time application for walk arounds or whatever. Max has some info in its help file that will explain it in further depth and I think there is even tutorials with Max. Anyway hope this helped!

[Da_elf]

basically its just a method of being able to convert your nice GI lighting and stuff into a texture map.

[ShaunDon]

Now can someone point to any documentation on how this is done? I've been meaning to ask you folks about this -- we have an upcoming project that will require me to get hardcore into texture baking. I'm on max 7 and VRay 1.47.03.

Thanks guys!
Shaun

[Clifton Santiago]

What I did was to go through the Max tutorials on texture baking so I got a handle on the standard scanline texture baking. Then I read Vlado's section in the manual about how to get Vray to do the texture baking within the Render to texture dialog. I can't remember the specifics of it right now...

Texture baking is actually the easy part. What is difficult is the programming involved once you get the file into the game engine. At least for me.

[Morbid Angel]

texture baking is not only for games, by far. We use it for film production as well.

Basicly texture baking is a way of rendering visual result of the model into a texture, which can then be applied on to the model to eather replicate the rendered result with extra fast speed of rendering or produce various effects ontop of what you already have. So, for example if you have a red teapot and you shine a blue light on it and render it, that result will be also rendered into texture "baked".

Bake terminology is not only used for textures, it is widely used for other operations such as animation, dynamics etc. By baking something you permanently terminate any flexibility of the "model" which it had prior to.
Vray baking works with max render to texture (RTT), in exectly the same way as scanline however with some additional features and limitations.
For example, as a feature you can bake GI into a texture, you can bake glossy reflection into a texture.
As a limitation you cannot bake vray displacement, you cannot use DR for baking.

Baking textures in max can use several options, such as automatic uv mapping or use existing uv mapping which model already has.
I suggest doing a lot of exeperementing before applying baking of textures to the production. However it is a very well used method.
I, for example use baking when I need to make a texture for a model, and I would use dome light to bake a model shading information into a texture, with which i work in photoshop.

[ShaunDon]

Morbid, I was wondering how baked glossies work -- since they're view-dependant, once they're baked how can that still work?

We're going to be providing baked model content for a client with a realtime application, however I'm hoping that once I learn the workflow I can implement it in our regular animations as Morbid described.

Shaun

[Morbid Angel]

well as i said, bake is permanently terminates anything related to the model, so if you bake a glossy it will be unchangable, really it cannot be used for reflection as one would imagine, however it can be used as an effect to be applied back to the shader over the original textures and so on.