Baking texture maps from high poly to low poly

Baking is the process of translating mesh information into image textures. All sorts of data can be extracted in this process and can be applied in a number of conventional and creative ways. Even if you're painting a texture by hand, a baked map provides a helpful guide for where model details are. A big part of the baking workflow is to bake from a high-poly mesh to a low-poly mesh; the high-poly mesh is usually unusable in production due to size. By baking that detail to maps, we get the functionality of the low-poly mesh with the details of the high-poly mesh. Some of the maps we create will immediately be used in our dragon's final material. Others will serve as auxiliary textures, creating images that we'll use for starting points and masks when painting the final textures. The first map we need to bake is called...