[ENDED] BC4-1810 - October 2018 Class Homepage - Shading & Lighting with Blender

williamatics That looks like you have sound muted - maybe you accidentally pressed the mute button on your keyboard? If that's the case you can press it again, or click on the sound icon and drag the handle that increases the volume. 

@theluthier I know YouTube has captions.  Could you please upload it to YouTube?

Question for what is baking used? Does it have one purpose or several? 

@theluthier Thank you!  My homework will probably be late again, unfortunately.

The CG Cookie forums have been really quiet these past couple of days... too quiet...

I wonder what you all have got in store come Sunday? Looking forward to it!

thecabbagedetective Yeah it's eerily quiet, isn't it? Spooky.. 

yyukinoh1989 Baking is used for cutting down on rendering calculations.  Where backing is mostly used is in game development to fake things, for example like lighting where calculating ray tracing in real time is very costly and will slow down the game to a crawl, so you save that information out into a map where now the engine just has to display a texture and not actually perform any calculations.  Or baking high resolution details to a low resolution mesh.  There are many types of baking.  More info.

silentheart00 so then if i would for example start retopology i can bake the hi resh model (using displacement ? i guess ? ) to then again make it look high res again ?
so in fact baking is good for gaming or just image renderings but not specific when you ever plan to animate someting ?

yyukinoh1989 That's exactly what they do in gaming; make a high res mesh, retopo a low poly mesh, then bake the high res out into a normal map, not a displacement map because the displacement map will actually deform the geometry, so you need lots of geometry to get the details, which defeats the whole purpose.  A normal map is better because it saves out lighting information in the red, green, and blue channels to fake the lighting.  Here's a video.

My focus is in game development, so I'm not sure about things outside that.  My best guess is if you're doing something film quality, it might be better to have high res models, textures, etc for more accurate lighting.  Games are a lot of faking and resource management whereas films are nothing but a sequence of images, so might as well make high quality images, right?  That's my best guess, though.

For animation, you should absolutely retopo your mesh.  Beyond that, though, I don't know what's the best way to tackle the animation pipeline because I have no desire to be an animator.  Maybe take a look through the animation courses and see if any answers lie there.

yyukinoh1989 You can think of baking sort of like data compression.  You take a whole bunch of information from your scene(which requires a lot of computational power), and cache only the bits that are most important for you.  If you have ever used a site like textures.com, you can think of baking as a way of generating custom maps, often textures, though you can bake all kinds of things: lighting, simulations, animations, and surface information.  Of course once the info is compressed, it isn't as robust or flexible as before, so you have to determine where it fits best in your workflow.  That will vary from project to project, though there are some trends for different fields.  Games and real time simulations will bake almost all texture information, usually at least some lighting information, and particle effects.  For still renders and film, I don't know that anyone bakes their lights, but textures frequently get baked to cut geometric computation or to preserve details on animation friendly models. For characters specifically, baking maps like normals, ao, and curvature can go a long way for workflow efficiency even when computational power may not be much of a factor when all is said and done. Ultimately, it's about selectively storing information to improve efficiency, and managing the trade-off between acceptable input and acceptable output.

silentheart00
thank you . it does indeed makes sense to go high res for animation . but i guess the animation course still needs to wait a bit. for now i try to focus on the class and the contest. trough in this case (for the pumpkin) i might need a normal map (still gonna have to watch a tutorial about baking normal maps since that still is new. But for now i first go retopology those pumpkins

pprocyonlotor Thank you . so in fact baking makes rendering a lot faster then ? also i once downloaded a texture but i wonder there where so many choices. how do i know what will be used where and what it does ? 

in the one map i have these files are available
AO (ambient occlusion )
bump
diff
disp
nor(is that the normal map then ? )
rough
spec
somehow i wonder if i want to use or try them . how do i know where to plug them in and what nodes i should have to use . (that is still the biggest struggle for me ) figuring out what nodes i still need to make the good connections and where to plug them in to each other (what socket to connect to what socket)

yyukinoh1989 I'd suggest watching Blender Guru's PBR videos. Here is one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aH6XPsEmozk 

This will give you a quick rundown on some of the basics.  The node editor will be something you just have to spend a lot of time with to learn, and even then you will run into folks doing all manner of foreign witchcraft in there, but the best way to learn is playing around and seeing what works.  Find tutorials as needed, and once you get your bearings, jump into the shader forge!!

Does someone know how to delete imported HDRIs from Blender 2.8? It's incredibly slow for me right now and I want to see if the amount of HDRIs I imported are the problem but I can't delete them. Deleting the folder and loading the Factory Settings didn't work, really frustrating.. 🙄

yyukinoh1989 I would recommend only using normal maps for small details, not big ones.  If you use normal maps for large bumps or protrusions, then it will look very ugly.  (That's why the only computer game I play is Minecraft.)

yyukinoh1989 Also, there's this course that talks about how to use normal maps.

bbsdwerbeagentur If it's one you "installed" and you're on Windows, they're buried in the AppData folder for your user. Typically, the path is something like:

C:\Users\(username)\AppData\roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.80\datafiles\studiolights\world

AppData is usually a hidden folder, so if you don't see it, turn on hidden files. (Windows 10 has a checkbox under the View menu for the file browser. I think older versions of Windows, you had to go to a properties menu for the parent folder to unlock hidden files).

Incidentally, the ones that come preinstalled in Windows follow the similar datafiles path in the directory where you extracted 2.8.

hello !

where do u post homeworks ?