Baked Texture Generation

Introduction

A huge thanks and shout out to Jeff Russell, who's laid the engineering groundwork for this chapter and was an amazing co-author. Special thanks to Joe Wilson for his work in designing our cover and all the time spent testing and tuning our system, and all of the Marmoset team for keeping the project rolling, love you all. Also, special thanks to Wessam Bahnassi for his amazing work as our technical reviewer and Patrick Cozzi for reaching out to us to let us know about the call for papers.

Abstract

Baking is a process of transferring surface data from high-polygon geometry to a texture meant to be used by low-polygon geometry. By baking, static data such as a model's normals, vertex colors, displacement, and even shading terms like ambient occlusion and diffuse lighting can be efficiently represented on a low-polygon mesh. In this way, greater detail can be provided with vastly reduced geometry. This process has been crucial in asset preparation for real-time systems for many years, and will likely continue to see heavy use. This chapter details a method of baking in artist driven environments.

More Resources

• Marmoset Toolbag 3's Baker

• Will Usher (@_wusher) released an open source baker here.