These courses should help you get up to speed in no time.
Baking is a technique we've taught many times through the years. Expand your understanding with these courses:
Learn core concepts of the texture baking process. We will cover important ideas that you'll need to understand to ensure you have a solid foundation for the rest of the course.
Baking can produce a surprising number of technical issues. From overlapping geometry to pixel bleed to flipped faces, this chapter diagnoses a myriad of common problems and how to troubleshoot them.
We can do some clever things to make the baking process easier and more effective. Gain expert insight to enhance your baking prowess.
Put your fresh baking knowledge to the test! These exercises begin with problematic bakes that you need to troubleshoot and resolve.
Hello there! As a Biome Artist at Mighty Canvas Inc, I spend most of my days creating game assets. By night, I'm an instructor teaching Blender, Instamat, and Substance mostly. Check out my other courses for CG Cookie as well as my YouTube channel if you're interested!
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This was a very good, in-depth view, into normal baking with blender and normal maps in general.
I do however miss the other information we can bake into textures.
A workflow presentation for getting all the maps we can use in game engines, or in Blender itself would be very welcome.
While information on this topic is scattered around the CGC Courses, a concentrated resource would serve well.
I see the tendency to use Substance or InstaMat, thanks for introducing me to the latter, but would love to see a refined blender approach.
I think without an addon, handling multiple materials on one object or multiple objects for one UV space is just too convoluted in Blender, but maybe I am missing something.
And while I would call it "Master the Art & Science of Normal Baking" the information and presentation is excellent.
Thank you for the review, and constructive feedback!
I totally hear what you're saying. While the workflow wouldn't deviate between the different types of textures and baking them out, I think there's value in being introduced to the different textures that we can bake using Blender. I will think about how I want to incorporate this as a bonus video!
RE: Baking multiple materials - I too would love to see a refined Blender approach in this regard, haha. As you've said, without addons Blender's baking ability is very narrow and can be rather convoluted. I don't think you are missing anything, Blender is notorious for this.
I definitely think there is room for a bonus section where I cover utilizing an addon for this, however as of right now default Blender's approach to baking does leave a lot to be desired.
Again, thank you for watching through the course and the glowing review! I greatly appreciate the feedback and look forward to implementing that bonus video. 😄
Normal map baking was something that mystified me for a long time. I searched and scoured, piecing together bits from the internet here and there to finally get to the point where it wasn't 'click and pray' for me. Chunck does a fantastic job breaking down all the theory and considerations! Having it all consolidated here is a boon to 3D artists and to the Cookie library. I'm excited to put what I learned here to work!
I too had similar experiences when trying to navigate learning texture baking, and the many pitfalls that comes with exploring that topic... Thus BAKE was born!
Thank you for the glowing review, I am honoured you think the course is such a significant boon. I'm hopeful that it only deepened your existing understanding of texture baking and perhaps shed some light on new techniques for your skillset!
I am looking forward to seeing you put these skills to good use. 😊
This course is very well structured and paced with many opportunities to test your knowledge of theory and use new techniques. I appreciate having the lessons arranged as a reference guide for baking issues, rather than a step-by-step "follow-me" guide. Even though Blender is used exclusively, the knowledge and techniques employed here are software agnostic.
Ecstatic to hear that, thank you for checking out the course!
I'm stoked to hear the course structure works for what you need. Texture baking can be unforgiving and needlessly complicated at times, so my goal is to make any subsequent watches of BAKE as straightforward and painless as possible when you run into troubles.
Thank you for the glowing review! Best of luck in your texture baking. 👨🍳
This was one of the best courses I've attended here at CG Cookie. It's probably a preferential thing and I can't quite put my finger on it, but all of the material that was covered was easy to digest and very relevant; there is very little to no fat in this course, which was refreshing.
I started Blender with the focus of game asset creation and baking is one of those things that is so essential to making high-quality game assets that I was just so happy when I saw this course launch and I wanted to attend right away; what's even more exciting is that it met my every expectation, so five stars!
Wow, beyond thrilled to have met every expectation! My hope is that BAKE acts as a good introduction to texture baking, and as a solid (and concise) reference for any subsequent watches when you run into baking issues down the road. When you just want a fix to your problem, the last thing you need is to go searching through a 30-minute video...
I'm honoured you've enjoyed your time with BAKE! Thank you for the five stars, I'm looking forward to seeing some killer textures. 😄