Blender Master Class

Chapter 10. Texture Baking

Having modeled, sculpted, retopologized, and UV unwrapped our models, we’re now ready to create textures and materials for them and then move on to lighting and rendering. In this chapter, we’ll focus on baking textures—creating procedural textures using the geometry, lighting, and materials of objects in our scene. For example, we’ll bake the normals of a high-poly sculpted mesh into a texture map or bake the shadows that a mesh receives in the cracks and grooves of its surface into a texture to mimic dirt and dust. Textures like these can then be used to aid in texturing and creating materials later.

In this chapter, we’ll discuss the various types of procedural texture maps that Blender is able to bake, their ...