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.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Jeff Russell (@j3ffdr) for his engineering leadership and co-authorship, Joe Wilson (@JoeWilsonEQ) for contributing the cover and his time testing the implementation, the Marmoset team (@marmosetco) for their continued support, Wessam Bahnassi (@wbahnassi) for his technical review, and Patrick Cozzi (@pjcozzi) for bringing the call for papers to our attention.

More Resources

• The Toolbag Baking Tutorial

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