Hi 
I hope i write it right but what is baking textures??
I have seen it mentioned in other "pro" forums but i have no idea what it is
As far i get it this should make the textures bettter? or so..
Anybody knows this

Chris

Attached Link: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cschan/534/Baked.pdf

http://www.public.iastate.edu/~cschan/534/Baked.pdf

If I recall, it takes lighting as well as the texture info but read the article, it gives far superior explanation than I could.  

Ask in the Texturing forum to see if anyone has any personal experience with it too...

Mmmm i think its a 3DMAX... thing...
Thnx teyon 
btw the texture forum looks as dead as the Tree in my garden 

Chris

You can do it in Maya and XSI also, though I think those may be the only apps that do it right now (I could be wrong). It's usually done in the gaming industry, not the film industry fro what I was told many moons back.  

As for the Texturing Forum, golly, I hadn't realized.  :)

I dont see WHY the 3d modeling "this one" forum and the Texturing forum cant be combined..
the Questions are both for multiple programs usualy..
I think i put this one in the "idea forum box"

Chris

Sounds like a plan to me. :)

Baking is mostly for real time, to mimic advanced lighting effects that the engine can't afford to calc. on the fly. It's all precalc. and exported right along with the uvs and texturing.
I use baked radiosity and .hdr lighting/environment effects rather often for real time walk-throughs.

Baking is undesireable for rendering, you actually have to take steps to remove 'baked' specularity, shadows, etc. from photographic textures.
It's why photos for textures are best taken on a cloudy overcast day, so there isn't much 'baked' lighting in the texture. The simulated lighting might not align with the 'baked' spec. and such, and then it would look wierd (think of shadows going the wrong direction, highlights on the wrong side of bump,...)

Another thing that is sometimes meant by 'baking' a texture is rendering a procedural texture (that you already know isn't going to export with an .obj file) onto a flat plane then using the pre-rendered proc. texture as an image texture in another program.
I do that a lot also, with the Bryce DTE, then paint onto the 'base' texture w/ photoshop, of just use it as is w/ some custom shaders. You could do that w/ any program. You could really almost say that any texture generator program is 'baking' textures (but maybe not lighting effects).
You could actually bake lighting from Vue, Bryce, Carrara, anything really, for use later in a real time engine. Max, and I guess Teyon says XSI and some others, just semi-automate the process for you, so there isn't a lot of 'leg work' to do manually.

Thank you for the explaining :}
Now i know i dont need it   
Thnx again

Chris 

Yeah, I second most of what's been said.

I wanted to add that LightWave can bake textures.

Also want to add that baking procedurals to an image is useful if you're network rendring across multiple cpu's with different chips, P3/P4/Core 2/AMD, as often they'll each calculate the procedurals slightly differently, which can be an issue if they're changing ever frame.

Its also helpful to bake off procedurals because they're typically much more render intensive than image maps. The downside is that you lose the open ended res of the procedurals and are left with a res capped image.

Lastly, if you know certain lights that will be unchanged in a scene, global lights and such, you can often bake them to your textures, to reduce the light calculations necessary come final render. Also, some people will bake off an ambient occlusion pass to add to their textures when they're not using radiostiy to give a little extra depth to things.

Carrara does baking using a plugin.

But my point is ..when i make textures for models "free or for sale"
do i need to bake E'm for better result .. or is it a animation thing "wich i think it is"

Thnx all for the input
Chris

Well, I'd imagine if you're using procedurals, and would like to make the model more accessable to users of other software packages, then you'll likely want to bake the procedurals to an image that's applied via UV map.

But as far as hand painted textures for an object go, I don't see a reason to be baking anything, unless you wanted to throw in a seperate texture/image of a baked occlusion pass, that can be added at the users discretion or something. Most things that get baked to textures, lighting/spec w/e, other than procedruals, are scene dependant I think, which is up to the end user.

My thoughts on the matter anyway.

IWarlock has picked up a pointer, in most apps when baking a texture you can select whether to including lighting / reflections etc. So you can bake a procedural out to your UV map and then hand touch up in a paint package - it's a fantastic way to work. Personally I've used this in Max, cinema and blender. There's a great a plugin for max which bakes dirt to an image, based on you defining wind / travek direction etc, another useful jump start for a hand made texture....

I do a lot of baking with my textures(via 3dsmax)..occlusion & diffuse(color) passes are a great way to start your texturing ..the color pass is used like a mask,each part of a model is given a solid color & that can then be cleanly selected at the texturing stage(very handy if it's a hard surface model built with many,many parts),the occlusion pass I use all over the place
..more info here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=46&t=373024

Baking textures for your own work, or for work where you know what 'final look' you want is a handy dandy tool.

On the other hand, 'baked in' lighting, reflections, specularity etc is one of the complaints higher end poser users have about a lot of character textures.  And for lower end users, it can make their image look better, without their extra effort. (could make lighting look odd. Light coming from one direction, and texture higlights from another.
Lighting is just one fo the things that can be baked in a texture.

Whether you want to bake textures or not will depend on what your end goal is.

[I vote for baking AO inside all characters nostrils... ban the nostril glow forever muaaaaahahhahahaaaaa :lol:]