I think Martin’s done a great job at consolidating a pretty large subject. I just wanted to jump in and share some insight as to how it relates to this course.
Because the intention for our model is to eventually be used in a video game, we are limited to the overall poly-count budget that we have for our “game-ready” model. What game artists will do is create a high-poly model that has all of the detail they want in it. In our case, this would be the tire tread patterns with all of the grooves and extrusions. The amount of polygons it takes to make this model is too much if we intend to have many of these tires around in a game world, so the artist will then make another lower-polygonal version of this model to be used in the game.
During the texturing process, we can project the details from the high-poly model onto the low-poly model and “bake” that information into a texture image. That is what the “baking” process refers to, and is what we cover in the Texturing/Baking sections of the course. Once we have generated these “baked” textures, we can use them to replicate the detail of the high-poly model onto our game-friendly one, making it appear far better quality than it actually is.
I hope that’s offered a little insight, please feel free to ask any further questions as you make your way through the course! 🙂
