Baking maps

For my main character of Project Ignite I have considered the use of baking. This cheaty technique allows us to create really high dense models consisting of 200,000 quads and condense them down to a game friendly 20,000 with minimal loss of quality.

We do this by making a very high poly version of what we want and then rendering all the information from that on top of a really low poly version of the same thing. We can bake all maps but the main few that are used in games are normal maps, height maps and ambient occlusion.

To bake in blender we get our very high poly model:

Then we make a low poly basic shape of it, mine is this cube:

Then all we need to do now is to switch over to the cycles renderer and select whicher map we want to use and the high and low poly versions then press render.

Once it has finnished, It will be exported to our textures. Here's the final result of our test baking:

We have successfully reduced this model fom 5,000 faces to 12 (a 99.76% reduction) just by moving all that data to a texture.

So why wouldn't everyone use baking then?

Well, nearly every game does use baked textures. The major reason to why you wouldn't is that baked textures cannot be edited without chaning the high poly model and then rebaking it to all of the textures you use and in virtual realiy games the magic behind the curtain is revealed, leaving players seing the flat baked textures up close. For these reasons, Project Ignite wont include any baked textures, Including the main character.