In this chapter, you'll bake and paint massive high-resolution textures, often adjacent to your high-poly dragon sculpture. Depending on the quality of your computer, creating these textures can end up taking forever or even result in Blender crashing. It's recommended that if your machine is struggling, instead opt to bake straight from the low-poly model and use textures at a lower resolution, such as 2,048, 1,024, 512, or even 256. Even on my good computer, I reduce samples in Cycles to 8 when struggling with repeat crashes.
You'll also paint on your textures and a painterly interface is ideal. Refer to Chapter 8, Illustrating an Alien Hero with Grease Pencil, for advice on tablet and stylus hardware.
Now, let's get set up for texture baking!
