Reply To: This lesson is going way too fast…

[Erik Meyers]

As this is discussion is already fresh I’ll simply add an extra piece of perspective for someone who is also new as well. My expectation was to come into this with an idea of what is baking and why use it and hopefully get an idea of how is it done partially.  

The flow of the video starts by seeming to have me have an understanding of what is baking before getting directly into talking about various settings of the tool. Along with going into other topics I am not familiar with such as GLSL shading, Highres Modifier, Ambient Occlusion, and some other stuff. There are many questions and it becomes apparent this is not a just follow along video and I’ll understand everything. I need to learn some topics and come back to this video series at a later time before trying to implement baking. It is a more complex topic than say UW mapping.

The main thing I feel I was able to take away from this is that baking allows one to bypass render time calculations by doing it ahead of time and store the information in a source which can be made readily available (image file). As retrieving information is probably faster than doing all new calculations. I think when I attempt to render a scene all baked objects do not have to be recalculated and speeds up the final render time. You can seemingly do this with a variety of things judging by the list and the biggest function of baking seems to be for storing calculations on lighting.

In any case this is my take away from the video and how I will have to adapt to the content material given how it is structured. I am not sure if that is your intent, but I think it achieved the goal of introducing baking’s existence and giving me some idea of what it is and how it is implemented in Blender. Though I feel there is certainly more to learn before I can start trying to implement it at all in some meaningful way.