What is "baking"? - Beginner questions + sculpt photo

sophiam

Hello, I'm a newbie at zbrush and I would like to ask some questions. 

1. After finishing sculpting, do I need to do retopology in order to polypaint and apply texture?
2. What is "baking" and how does it work?
3. What should be my next step after i finish this sculpt?

I'm sorry for the newb questions! It would be really helpful if anyone answers one of them.
Also, this is my first sculpt in zbrush i am working on. 

Chidambhar_Swaroop

I am not a pro but I think I could give u some answers ...

1.If u r modelling this character for game use. U should definitely create a low poly. Why is it? Bcas in a game u can't have so many polys's as an animated movie will have. So u should definitely create low poly to texture it..
2.Baking is very simple. U take both the High Poly and the Low Poly Mesh and bake the information like details and stuff to the low poly... Eg. Normal Map - Details, Ambient Occlusion  etc
3.Basically next is to create the low poly, then unwrap it, bake normals and AO (Ambient Occlusion) and also if u want different materials for each mesh, u should bake something called Material id. So you can assign material based on the color id...

Ged

most people bake thier models in a painting tool these days like substance painter or substance designer. Simply put its taking the details of the high poly model and projecting them on to a clever set of textures that can be used to make a lowpoly model look like a high poly model.

read the wiki for more info:
http://wiki.polycount.com/wiki/Texture_Baking

Zalek4

This pic was just sitting on my hard drive, and I have no idea where I got it from, so credit to whoever you are if you're reading this

This is exactly what the baking process looks like in terms of general workflow. There's a lot of pipeline stuff that goes in between each of these steps, but the link @Ged provided is a good start if you're new.


Everyone here will answer questions you may have if you post!
Good luck!

EarthQuake

This tutorial covers the essentials: https://www.marmoset.co/posts/toolbag-baking-tutorial/

sophiam

Thank you everyone for the comments! It's my first time in polycount and I'm just taken back from all the unexpected help! Thank you, thank you for being so nice and supportive.