Texture Baking - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 139

Baked texture

Bake
Bake mode

Clear
Margin

Selected to Active
Distance and Bias

Active UV texture
shown on model

Figure 10-1: Texture-baking controls while working in the UV editing layout we created in Chapter 8. The UV editing layout is
useful because it allows us to access our baking controls through the Properties editor, the baked images through the UV Image
editor, and the objects in our scene through the 3D Viewport, all in one layout.

by the selected object's surroundings, Blender
will take into account the other objects (meshes,
lights, and so on) that are on the currently vis-
ible layers. To bake the lighting for an object in
isolation, place it temporarily on its own layer,
along with the lights you want to affect it.

Ambient Occlusion This renders ambient occlu-
sion for the object, taking into account any
other visible, renderable objects on the cur-
rently active layers. Ambient occlusion is a self-
shadowing effect that creates dark areas in the
corners and crevices of objects. It's useful both
for mimicking the effect of more complex light-
ing, as well as for creating a rough map of areas
where dirt and dust are likely to accumulate.
This kind of map is often very useful when cre-
ating textures and materials (see Figure 10-2).

* Baking is currently supported only when you use the

Blender Internal renderer. If you don't see any baking
options, make sure that you have Blender Internal
selected as your render engine from the Info Editor
header (see Figure 10-1).

Shadow This renders the shadows from lights in
the scene into a map.

Texture Map Types
You can bake several different map types, some of
which are more important than others. Here's what
Blender has to offer:

Normals This takes the normal vector of the
object's surface at each point and records it as
an RGB value. This is done in a variety of ways,
depending on the normal space option you
choose. Different normal spaces record the nor-
mals of the mesh relative to different coordinate
systems. For example, the Camera option records
them relative to the camera; World , according
to world space; Object , according to the object's
local coordinates; and Ta ng e nt , according to the
surface normal of the baked object itself.

Full Render This does a full render, including
textures and lighting of your surface. The result-
ing texture is exactly how your model will look
in your final render, mapped to the object's UV
coordinates.