What is Texture baking?

Baking captures something expensive once and stores it in a cheap texture. The most common case: a sculpt with millions of polygons is baked onto a light game mesh, producing a normal map that keeps the detail visible.

Common bakes

• Normal: high-poly surface detail moved onto a low-poly mesh.
• Ambient occlusion: soft contact shadows.
• Base colour: transfers a texture from one UV layout to another, which is useful after re-unwrapping.
• Full lighting ("lightmaps"): bakes all lighting into the texture for scenes that never change.

The trade-off

Baked lighting looks great and costs nothing at runtime, but it can't react to moving lights. Several hand-painted models in our library, such as the axolotl in a flask, have their lighting painted or baked in on purpose. They look the same in any viewer, at the cost of not responding to your scene.

Baking and AI models

Image-to-3D results often have lighting from the original photo baked into their colour texture. If your model has a shadow painted on one side, that's why. Shoot evenly lit photos to avoid it.