Design Nomenclature / Digital Model Making
Texture Baking
Also called baking, map baking, bake
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
Precomputing a result into a texture indexed by UV, so it is looked up at runtime rather than evaluated. Anything can be baked: lighting, occlusion, curvature, a procedural graph's output, the surface of another mesh. What you buy in cost you pay in flexibility — the result is welded to that geometry and that light.
In practice
“Bake” means at least six things: bake lighting, bake normals, bake a sim to keys, bake a modifier, bake procedurals to bitmaps, bake a subdivision level. Ask which.
Not to be confused with
- Normal BakingRecording a high-resolution surface's normal direction per texel into a map the low-resolution mesh reads, so a flat face shades as if the detail were there. Rays are cast from the low mesh along its interpolated normals; a cage — an inflated copy of the low mesh — sets how far they search and stops them missing.
- ShaderA program run per vertex or per fragment that returns a value — usually a colour, sometimes a position, a depth, or an arbitrary buffer. A material is the authored asset configuring one. Node graphs are a visual editor over the same code: the graph compiles, and its execution model is still per-pixel and parallel.