Baking
Read these pages in order, or jump to the one you need.
- BakingTopicTransferring detail and information from a high-poly mesh (or the low poly itself) into textures; what each common map stores and is used for, the main bakers, a reliable workflow, naming, anti-aliasing and resolution.
- Bake cageKey termAn inflated copy of the low poly that tells the baker where rays start and which direction they travel; averaged cages avoid gaps at hard edges, and a cage that is too large or too small causes most projection errors.
- Bake groups and exploded bakesKey termTwo ways to stop parts of a model from baking onto each other; pair each low-poly part with its own high poly by group or by name, or move the parts apart before baking, and handle the lost contact shadows.
- Curvature, thickness and ID mapsKey termThe utility maps baked next to normal and AO maps (curvature, thickness, ID, position and world-space normal) and how texturing tools use them as masks for wear, dirt, colour and translucency.
- Tangent space and MikkTSpaceKey termThe per-vertex frame a normal map is read in; why the baker and engine must calculate it identically (MikkTSpace), what a synced workflow is, and which engines expect OpenGL (Y+) or DirectX (Y−) green channels.
- Fixing baking artefactsGuideA diagnostic guide to the common errors in baked maps (skewing, waviness, seams, ray misses, intersections, AO bleeding, gradients and jagged edges) with the cause of each and the fixes, in the order to try them.