Baking the textures

The process of baking the textures is essential to make our textures work outside of Blender, given that every render engine has its own method of interpreting, mixing, and displaying them. But what most of them do have in common is the use of the color (or diffuse), roughness (or glossy), and normal texture maps. So, we’ll take all the tweaks, mixes, effects, and hand-painted textures we made in Blender and turn them into usable texture maps. Unfortunately, though, you’ll have to either apply or delete any modifiers you may have left in order for it to work properly, so make sure you’re absolutely satisfied with how your object has turned out so far.

We’ll cover two baking methods: first, from high poly to high poly (meaning the exact same object, with the exact same UVs), and second, from high poly to low poly (meaning we’ll transfer all of the detail from the high-poly model we’ve been working on in the past chapters...