I unfortunately didn't understand any of the baking things shown in the video. why do we need to bake in the first place? Is there a course available dedicated to teaching only the basics of baking?
thank you.
Hey @INUMAKI TOGE,
We bake our textures so we can use the model in different programs. Your model will look great in Blender, but you need to have texture maps to plug into other programs, such as game engines.
Take a look at baking-textures-with-cycles lesson from the fundamentals-of-texturing-in-blender course.
We also did a lot of baking in Collab2022, it was an essential part of the whole project. You can watch all the livestreams or this one where Kent went into baking, after the 2 hour and 50 minute mark sort of.
https://cgcookie.com/live-streams/collab2021-week-3-shading-lighting
Why do we need to bake in the first place?
If you're just rendering him out in Cycles or Eevee then it's not generally necessary, but like Adrian mentioned it's essential if you want to export the model to any other program. It also just speeds up viewport performance since Eevee slows down with big node setups.