Chapter 25: Creating Baked Textures and Normal Maps


Overview

3D games pose an interesting dilemma-creating interactive scenes that are displayed in real-time with the highest quality graphics. To achieve this, game developers use a number of tricks designed to speed up the rendering time. One of these tricks is pre-rendering textures and applying these pre-rendered textures as texture maps. The process of applying pre-rendered textures as maps is called baking a texture.

Rendering textures is a significant part of the rendering process, and baking a texture doesn't remove this step; it simply completes the step beforehand, so that the game engine doesn't need to do the texture calculations.

Another common efficiency trick is to apply colors as vertex colors. By applying vertex colors, the model keeps track of the color value for each vertex in a mesh. This is much more efficient than requiring a memory-hogging bitmap to accompany a model.

Vertex colors are so efficient that a single model can include multiple sets of vertex colors and each set is stored in a channel that can be changed as needed by the game engine. For example, one channel can include the colors for a new car model with a shiny new paint job and another channel can be used as the car becomes damaged later in the game.

This chapter covers some of the features found in Max that enable the amazing graphics that are found in the latest real-time games.




3ds Max 9 Bible
3ds Max 9 Bible
ISBN: 0470100893
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 383

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