Understanding texture baking

Texture baking is a process by which the xNormal software (I will cover xNormal in the Introduction to xNormal section) takes certain aspects from the surface of the high-poly model and then projects those aspects onto the surface of the low-poly model, to create new texture maps. These new texture maps can be used in procedural texturing software, such as Quixel Mixer.

Note

We will cover the use of Quixel Mixer in Chapter 5, Texturing Your Models inside Quixel Mixer.

The end result of the texture baking process is a texture map that holds information about various aspects of the high-poly model. For example, some of these aspects include the degree of sharpness of the edges of the model or information about fine geometric details on the high-poly model.

In xNormal, we can choose which aspects from the high-poly model we want to bake into a texture map. For our tutorial, we will bake three of these texture maps. The three texture maps that...