Baking - What temp?

godonholiday

Hi, I am new to 3d and was wondering if anyone had any good resources for explaining what baking is and why you want to use do it?


I understand that some models are low poly and other high poly. Is it that you are just taking the modelling from the high poly and taking a snapshot?

You then 'bake' this snapshot onto the surface of the low poly? Or are you just creating a texture based on that bake and applying it to the low poly?

As for when it is used, I assume it is not something you use for all geometry? Maybe the surface of a sci-fi door, but the door handle would still be its own model?

I have a second question about scale of models. If you were to model a sci-fi city or any city, for a shot like the one in this linke: http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/future_City_desgns.jpg

What scale you you use for the building? How big would your scene be?

Thanks for any help and I look forward to sharing some models on here soon

G

cryrid

It can apply to different things, but I think the most common one is when you take any information from a model or 3d scene and then put it into a static texture image.

For example, one could bake lights and shadows into a diffuse color texture, or into their own lightmaps. Another big one is baking normal maps, in which case the pixels of the normal map each store a normal (a vector that describes the surface slope of the original high-res mesh at that point). When a normal map is applied to a low-poly mesh, the texture pixels control the direction each of the pixels on the low-poly mesh will be facing in 3D space, creating the illusion of more surface detail or better curvature. -wiki.

Baking in general is not something that every mesh requires, and even if you do find yourself baking some piece of information into a texture map you're certainly not required to bake everything you can possibly bake. A game like Crysis 3 would probably want less lighting information stored into its diffuse textures so that the engine can handle all the lighting dynamically, but still could benefit from having a normal map baked (and even then, I imagine not everything in a game like that would need to be normalmapped). A more stylized game on the otherhand might be able to get away with baking some lighting into the color textures instead of more complicated shaders, as this could aid the hand-painted look while taking away some of the burden on the rendering engine.

I have a second question about scale of models. If you were to model a sci-fi city or any city, for a shot like the one in this linke: http://www.videocopilot.net/blog/wp-...ity_desgns.jpg

What scale you you use for the building? How big would your scene be?

That would depend on what you're building it for. For example, you could have completely different results depending on if the goal would be to have a full city that a camera could fly through, or if it's more of a background set that could be seen but never explored.

godonholiday

Thanks so much for the reply.

I am trying to read as much about it as possible, and seem to get a few things mixed up. I am just trying to get a higher level of understanding on the processes involved.

As for the city, I guess I am coming at that from the point of.. OK I want to model a scene like that. Do I add a 6foot character in the scene and then use that scale to size the building height?

So I get that if it was a background image, then it would be small as it is in the distance.. So for exploring and moving around (maybe even the camera) O would have to make large buildings and models.

Thanks

repete

Do I add a 6foot character in the scene and then use that scale to size the building height?

Yes exactly how I do it !

I use the mudbox man for all my scaling needs and he is about 182cm. Just build the world around that and you're done or build the world and scale it to your needs.

siddhant_ph1991

can anyone tell me the difference between the normal map baking in maya and the normal map extraction in mudbox???? i mean there's a vast difference in the quality of normal map extracted from each one of the process.....