Baking

Texture baking is the process of taking high detail texture data from a high polygon model and transferring this onto a lower resolution model to be used within a game environment.

During 2015 the Faculty purchased a number of specialist servers to provide a dedicated “render farm” to help expedite 3D development. The system was purchased and integrated by Escape Studios, a company that provides and supports some of the biggest names in TV and Film VFX in the UK.

The render farm has drastically reduced the time it takes to render photo realistic environments. Housed at City South, the 4 blade system provides 128 Gig of ram which helps us to respond more quickly to what has become a fairly demanding work flow. 

Although initially used mainly for our rich media online simulation work stream, the farm is increasingly being used to bake out textures for use within the Unity3D platform and for visualization projects.

Using the farm these textures are baked out within the native modelling packages 3ds Max and Maya and then exported into Unity giving a highly detailed output as well as reducing the processing required for the assets. Other methods are also being explored for a more efficient texture creation pipeline, to make scene production more efficient and scalable.