Reply To: Baking for Beginners Course?

[Jonathan Lampel]

Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions. While I will put this on our list, it’s not something I can do in the immediate future, though I will try to clear up any questions in this thread. 

I am not finding a simple course or maybe full article on Baking all the possible maps offered in Blender let alone the “COMBINATION” selection. 

Kent gives a good quick overview of combined baking in the Fundamentals of Texturing course: https://cgcookie.com/lesson/map-baking-with-cycles

Maybe someone can explain when you would need some of the “odd” ones people tend not to talk about like SUBSURFACE, TRANSMISSION, EVIRONMENT, EMIT, SHADOW 

“Baking” just refers to taking something dynamic and easily changable and makes it more permanent but less computationally expensive. (think of baking a simulation – you can tweak the settings before baking but it runs slowly, and after baking you can’t tweak the settings but it plays back faster).

In the cases of render baking, it’s baking the different attributes of light to the surface of an object – subsurface is the light that gets scattered inside, transmission is the light that passes through, emit is the light that comes from the surface, and shadow is the absence of light that’s being blocked from the surface.

The best way to see how it works is just to set up different materials that have those attributes, unwrap them, and give those types of baking a try just to experiment.

This speaks to a lot of Blender questions for noobs -that is, the assumption that noobs must know Baking or some other process/command. 

I really hope we don’t give that impression! Besides baking normals and AO (which we’ve covered in a few places already), I very rarely bake any other type of map. They’re there as options if you need them, but if you don’t than it’s not something that will hold you back in any way.

Since there’s a million things to learn when it comes to 3D, here’s a good rule of thumb: if it’s not holding you back from making what you want to make, and it’s not something you’re excited about, don’t feel preassured to learn it. Hope that helps!