Hi guys, I’m still pretty fresh with texturing and shading but I always wondered what does baking mean? I’ve seen tutorials on how to bake normal maps but never understood the term bake. Is it only used to make normal maps or something else also? I always hear people say “bake” this or that but I don’t know if they are referring to normal maps… LOL Is baking used for something else? Like lighting and stuff?
The more I keep doing research about blender and tutorials there’s more stuff popping out i have no idea what it means. I come from SW so the vocabulary its quite different -
I appreciate any comments, thanks. I hope everyone is having a great day.
Normal maps can be baked from geometry to make it so when that is rendered a second time it will render faster and with less memory. The normal map could also be used in a game engine.
Other things that can be baked are physics, other 2D maps like light maps, and different motions. Physics calculations can happen different on different computer as well as different on the same computer so when going to do a final render baking the physics is a good idea. Other maps like AO and light maps can also be a good thing to bake. That way the base color can be used to give the appearance of all the complex ray tracing that happens in Cycles, but in real time. This is good for games as well as Eevee when some more advanced shadows or lighting with GI is wanted. For other motions baking can also refer to baking a character animation into a NLA clip. NLA is non linear animation and is great for doing some mixing of complex movements.
So yes baking is a general term used for many things.
Baking typically refers to turning potentially dynamic data into a static form. Baking textures from procedural materials into a static image texture for an example. Or in case of normal maps you are baking literally the geometry normals as data into the pixels mapped onto a (typically) lower resolution geometry.
sorry for the late reply. Will you guys say its better to bake all the maps, including roughness,ao,specular,etc? Even if I’m just using a texture image as a color output in my BSDF node? I’m currently modeling a building but not using any procedural textures/shaders and no PBR’s just an image texture for color and simple changes like the roughness. I guess baking would make sense if I had complex texture in my model? Let’s say I want to add some bumps to my texture with a noise texture mixed with a voronoi texture, just to make it simple, will it be better to bake the map?(I don’t know if you can bake bump maps) But this would make the render process a little bit faster? Also can you bake volumetric lights? Thanks Guys
If you’re rendering in Blender, and just sending constants (numbers or colors) to a value like roughness, there’s no need to bake-- checking a constant is faster than checking a texture.
You can bake bump maps, but for me it involves some temporary material changes (running bump color into emission and baking emission, then fixing my material back to what it was before.)
If you’re rendering in Blender (so thus don’t need to bake) and you’re using relatively simple materials, you probably don’t want to bother baking out every procedural you’re using. They’re better as procedurals (better filtering, better magnification, more easily edited) and baking takes time and effort that could be spent elsewhere.
I think I understand more or less of what baking means. It makes sense to not bake the procedural textures in blender if I’m not exporting it to another software like unity, unreal or another 3D software? So baking just takes the data produced from blender and makes it “still” lets say in an image right? So when used in other software I don’t have to set it up again since I already have the “data” from the baked maps from blender… This is what I understood so far lol I might have to try and see it in action. Thank you so much for taking your time, I really do appreciate it.
If that, or if you’re not using complicated materials.
One of the things that beginners don’t understand is that tutorial materials are demonstrations of techniques that are intentionally simple. A real, pro node material might take pages and pages and hundreds of individual node groups; a beginner’s material is unlikely to. It’s more like a noise texture into a color ramp into a principled.
(I recently demo’d how to do a matcap material, maybe ten nodes, and I heard, “That’s a lot of nodes to do it though” and I thought, “Lol you don’t even know.” Kept my mouth shut though, if that person keeps learning, it will eventually become apparent.)
So let’s say you’re a beginner, and you have a node group that maybe has ten nodes, and you’re rendering 120 Eevee frames once. How long will it take you to bake? Maybe five minutes, if you know what you’re doing. How much time will it save you on rendering? Less than that. Bake? No.
Let’s say you’re a pro, and you have a node group that has 200 nodes, and you’re rendering 20000 Cycles frames, and you’re trying to make animation dailies anyways. How long will it take you to bake all your textures? A couple of hours, probably, to figure everything out and bake out the proper components. How much time will you save on rendering? More than that. With dailies, much more than that. Bake? Yes.
so there’s a science behind it. If you put it that way it seems it’s a lot of figuring out what to bake or not. So i guess there are certain things that are worth baking? Maybe baking isn’t even worth on every material since it doesn’t really saved any rendering time maybe the other way around, why waste time on baking maps that are “simple” when you can do it on more complex materials I guess. I think I understand if you put it in that perspective where there’s tons of complex objects/materials to be rendered or maybe im wrong lol but time is money xD BTW I also want to get into procedural texturing or to get a better understanding with the nodes where do you think is a good place to start with? Thank you also for explaining baking in more detail. I appreciate it
For memory management as well as performance purposes - even if only rendering in cycles, it can still make good sense to bake into textures, if it is a really, really complex and heavy shader material.
