Texture Baking - Blender Master Class: A Hands-on Guide to Modeling, Sculpting, Materials, and Rendering - page 141

Specular Colors This bakes the color of specular
reflections of a material into a texture and is
useful for baking procedural values to an image
texture.

Specular Intensity This bakes the amount of spec-
ular reflection of a material into a texture. It's
useful for baking procedural values to an image
texture.

Each kind of texture map has a purpose from
time to time, but in this chapter, we'll focus on
ambient occlusion, texture, normal, and displace-
ment maps most often. Of the texture maps, these
maps are the most useful for use with painted tex-
tures and for rendering detailed final models.

Baking Textures for the Bat Creature
In the case of the Bat Creature, my aim was to
create textures for the skin and to bake a displace-
ment map for rendering the final model with a
Displace modifier in order to capture all the details
I sculpted earlier. In this section I'll discuss how I
baked maps for ambient occlusion and displacement
to help with this. I'll also cover baking a normal
map as an alternative to displacement maps, one
that renders a lot more quickly though at the cost of
some accuracy in representing the fine details.

Figure 10-3: Normal mapping vs. displacement
mapping

applied to a plane and a cylinder. The normal-
mapped objects capture a lot of the shading
with much lower polycounts, but they don't
affect the actual shape of the mesh or cast
shadows. The displacement-mapped objects
are much more realistic, but they have to be
subdivided in order to capture all the details.

Baking Displacement from Sculpt to Final Mesh
Because I continued sculpting on the retopologized
mesh, I could just render the final mesh directly.
But this isn't always desirable, because the Multires
modifier can sometimes get corrupted and display-
ing its effects in the 3D Viewport can be slow and
unwieldy. A better solution would be to bake a dis-
placement map using either the high-poly sculpt,
which can then be applied as part of a material, or
the Subdivision Surface and Displace modifiers to
reconstitute the high-poly details of the mesh only
when it is rendered, leaving it simple and quick to
work on in the 3D Viewport.
To bake the displacement for the Bat Creature,
I first selected the body of the creature (the high-
poly sculpt), duplicated it, and then applied the
Multires modifier at level 3. This is the mesh I'll use
as the final body mesh for rendering. (I'll add the
hair that I created in Chapter 9 to the final scene as
a separate object.) This captures most of the detail
already, but I'll use a displacement map to capture
the highest resolution detail.

Alpha This bakes the alpha transparency of the
mesh to a texture. It's useful for baking proce-
dural values to an image texture.

Emission This bakes the emission color and
amount of a material into a texture. As with
the texture map, this can be useful in bak-
ing procedural emission colors into an image
texture.

Mirror Colors This bakes the color of ray-traced
reflections for a material into a texture. It's use-
ful for baking procedural values to an image
texture.

Mirror Intensity This bakes the amount of ray-
traced reflection for a material into a texture
and is useful for baking procedural values to an
image texture.