What texture baking is and why you need it

It may seem that texture baking is something from cooking. Something completely inapplicable to the realm of game making and design. However, one of the overlapping points is the extremely meticulous attention to detail.

So why bake textures, and why is it so important in the context of modern game graphics?

Well, let's break it down.

Why bake textures?

Below are the main reasons why you might need to resort to texture baking.

Simplify rendering

Baking simplifies rendering because the engine has to calculate all the shadows, lights, and polygons in every frame. Baked textures already contain information about reflections, lighting, volume, and other object properties that create a sense of realism.

Avoid copyright infringement

When an artist sells a model using materials downloaded from any source, he or she risks copyright infringement.

Very often, the content is distributed under a royalty-free system, which allows the user to use objects in their work for commercial purposes, but not in their original form. Especially in this case, baking textures helps to avoid problems when using such content: the future buyer will not have access to the source code. Instead, they will receive texture sets containing only fragments of third-party materials.

By the way! All textures on our site are distributed on a completely free model. This means that you can use them as you wish - whether you are trying to commercialize the product or just do something for yourself. We have 3D PBR textures available for download representing bricks, concrete, cloth, floor, leather, marble and so on. We also have ready-made 3D models and textures with materials for them. All these can be downloaded without registration.

Optimize

And perhaps the most important reason to bake textures is to achieve peak optimization. The fact is that it is irrational to load multi-million polygon models into game engines and rendering systems.

That's why they're baked.

Bake millions of polygons into one and save a lot of resources.

What textures can be baked?

There are many different types of textures, each of which adds unique properties to an object's surface. This diversity is due to the fact that each software has different shader systems and toolkits.

Strictly speaking, the task is to prepare sets based on the specifics of the game engine, rendering system and overall visual style of the project.

More specifically, textures are most often used:

• Diffuse Map
  
• Normal Map
  
• Displacement Map
  
• AO Map
  
• Specular Map
  
• Gloss Map
  
• Metallic Map
  

Of course, textures also have special properties like emissivity/curvature/opacity/transparency etc., but there is no point to go into them here.

If you'd like to know more about them, let us know in the comments! We will prepare a new material.