Baking
High-poly detail → low-poly texture
Also known as: Map baking · Texture baking
Definition
Baking is the process of transferring information from a high-resolution source (a sculpt, a procedural shader, or a lighting setup) onto a 2D texture mapped to a lower-resolution mesh. Common bakes are normal, ambient occlusion, curvature, position, thickness, and ID maps — each captures a different property of the high-poly that the low-poly cannot represent geometrically.
In production
Marmoset Toolbag is the industry-standard baker for game art because of its quality previews and "skew painter" for fixing bake artefacts. Substance Painter has an integrated baker that is fast and usually sufficient for props and hard-surface kits, though it offers fewer manual override tools than Marmoset when cage adjustments are needed. The single most common bake artefact is normal map "ray leaking," where the projection cage intersects neighboring geometry and picks up detail from the wrong part of the high-poly — fixed by manually pushing the cage outward in problem areas or painting per-mesh "max ray distance" overrides. Baking requires matching UV shells between the low-poly and an exploded or grouped high-poly, and most pipelines use naming conventions (`_high` / `_low` suffixes) so Marmoset or Substance auto-matches meshes by name during the "by mesh name" bake mode instead of slower "by whole scene" projection. xNormal remains a free, scriptable alternative still used for batch-baking large prop libraries overnight.
