How do I bake textures? What does this even do?
Google is your friend: https://www.google.com/search?q=How+do+I+bake+textures%3F+What+does+this+even+do
I think it’s worth explaining what baking does.
Baking is a process that creates a texture based on an exisiting 3D model.
it’s used for a few purposes:
-Baking can transfer detail from a high resolution model to a low resolution model. Lots of artists will create a character as a sculpt with millions of polygons. This is not useable in an animation or a game engine, so you create a second version of the character with fewer polygons and use baking to turn the fine details of the sculpt into textures that can be used on the lower res character.
-Baking can collapse complex materials into a single set of textures. Sometimes, texture artists will create complex materials with a bunch of different textures mixed together with masks and lots of procedural noise nodes and other fancy effects. Those kinds of complicated materials are heavy on performance and cannot be exported to other software, so you use baking to turn it all into a simple set of textures that can be directly plugged and will just work.
-Baking can also be used to turn the lighting of a scene into textures, to speed up the rendering of scenes where the lights don’t change.
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How do I bake?
Look at the videos I linked in my post, they are tutorials exactly for what I am talking about.