Texture Baking - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 137

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tex ture bAking

Having modeled, sculpted, retopologized, and UV
unwrapped our models, we're now ready to create
textures and materials for them and then move
on to lighting and rendering. In this chapter, we'll
focus on baking textures—creating procedural
textures using the geometry, lighting, and materials
of objects in our scene. For example, we'll bake the
normals of a high-poly sculpted mesh into a texture
map or bake the shadows that a mesh receives in the
cracks and grooves of its surface into a texture to
mimic dirt and dust. Textures like these can then be
used to aid in texturing and creating materials later.
In this chapter, we'll discuss the various types
of procedural texture maps that Blender is able
to bake, their uses, and how to bake them. In
Chapter 11, we'll move on to combining these
baked textures with hand painting and other tech-
niques in GIMP and Blender, cleaning them up
and combining them with other texture sources,
such as photos. Then, in Chapter 12, we'll cover

how to plug all these kinds of maps into Blender's
materials system to create realistic materials for
rendering our models with.

Images and Textures
First, a little terminology: The terms image and
texture are often used interchangeably. In most cir-
cumstances, this is fine, but I shall try to avoid con-
fusion here by explaining my terminology. An image ,
for our purposes, is a picture, perhaps in the form of
an image file, like a .jpg or .tiff file or a file generated
within Blender's UV Image editor with no specific
file type assigned to it yet.
A texture in Blender can be any kind of input
used to affect the look of a material applied to an
object. A texture can be an image, but a texture
may also be procedurally generated or taken from
a video, point cloud data, or something even more
obscure. But because we frequently use images as