Baking
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Hi everybody, I have always heard of the term "baking" a model, I am curious what does this mean and why is it done and how do you
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A slightly different explanation:
Render a fully textured and lighted scene or model. The shadows and shading created by the lighting are then added to the scene textures permanently so that they do not need to be rendered again. This is popular in games where it would consume too much GPU processing power to have to create light and shadows for every single frame and viewing angle, by baking the textures when the game (map, level, scene, etc...)is initially created by the developer the game engine only needs to work with moving objects such as characters in the game when played by the user.
In other words, think of a lamp post's shadow being cast on a wall. Without baking, the rendering engine has to re-calculate that shadow every single time the scene is rendered. Once baked, even if you removed the lamp post, the "shadow" would still be on the wall - it was baked onto the (.gif, .jpg or whatever) and is now part of the texture.
Several 3d software modelers support baking textures - 3D Studio Max is probably one one the most popular.
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And in SketchUp, LightUp is probably the only true renderer that bakes the textures onto your model. All other renderers just do renderings of your model. But LightUp actually bakes the shadows onto your sketchup model, and then lets you navigate a fully baked model inside of SU, so you can actually navigate a full rendered model in real time.
Chris
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Ok, thank you guys for enlightening me, I will try light up and practice that "baking" process, thank you again for the information
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Baking is a generic term used whenever you save out some data on a model.
In graphics, Baking can mean Lightmaps (like LightUp uses) or it can mean saving lighting to vertex colors (as you can do in Maya), or saving out skinned weights for an animation.
The general gist, is taking some 'ingredients' (aka parameters) and 'baking' (aka applying some process) that saves just the end result eg LightMaps, Vertex colors etc.
Adam
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