Hello

I read the term baking quite often
What does it mean exactly ?

Thanks

as in baking shadowmaps?

It means the shadowmap is stored in the texture.

Baking means saving the shadowing in a level in a skin of the related model.

Look at this video from Nowherebrain:

[video:youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts7sXIzw1X0[/video]

Or at this explainations:

http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/render-baking/

Baking can mean a lot.

You can bake shadows directly into a texture (given you have no tiling uv-map).
You can bake shadows into a lightmap and apply it via second uv-map to have both, tiling UVs and shadows.
You can bake ambient occlusion into textures.
You can bake textures from a high poly model with procedural textures.
You can bake normal maps into a lowpoly model texture from a high poly mesh.

So actually it means that you bake, carve or store informations from something complex into something less complex.

Thanks all

Actually I tead it in a context which was " animation " related

Think of "baking" as you would in real life ... when you "bake" a cake (for example). When baking a cake you first get all the ingredients you need, mix them all together and then for the final step (before it becomes an actual cake) you bake it. Baking it takes all the ingredients and gives you the final product: the cake.

In the gaming world, as Frank pointed out, you can "bake" a lot of things (just like you can bake more than just cakes ). But you first have to put together all of your ingredients. If you want to bake a shadow into a texture (Frank's first explanation) then you will need your texture and your shadow (or a light to cast the shadow). Once you have your "ingredients" you can then bake to get the final results (a single texture that includes light and shadow information).

You mentioned animation. The same would apply. Someone would gather all the ingredients (model, bones, etc) and bake the animation so that you get a final result: a model that is now animated.

Often, for a game model, someone will create a high polygonal model and a low polygonal version as well. The high polygonal model will be used to "bake" a normal map for the low poly model to make it look like it has more detail. The modeler may also bake other maps such as ambient occlusion, bump maps, etc. Depending on the application used, this baking process can be done in one step (provided all the ingredients are there and ready to be used).

So, again, baking, as in the real world of cooking, is putting the ingredients together properly and, as a final step toward the final result, baking those ingredients together to form a single entity (a cake for cooking, a model for a game, etc).

thanks very good explanation

I'm curious about the baking in context of animation:
Was it about baking physical movement into an animation?

One method of baking animation is used in facial expressions, where animation is stored in a 'morph' texture. I have seen this done before (in the directx SDK) but not in A7..

I once saw a Softimage video where they took a fully animated human model and placed it overlapping a completely different model that was not animated at all. Then, using some special tools within the app, they baked the animations from the fully animated model into the non-animated model. From what I remember, the non-animated model did not have a skeleton set up or any information for which vertices were attached to which bones, etc. So the non-animated model got all of its information from the fully animated model and, despite the differences in the models, it worked out fairly well. This meant that new models could have animations baked into them and then tweaked if needed, thus speeding up the process.

I am not an animator, so I might have described this incorrectly.