Texture Baking & Rendering Flashcards
7 cards from real 3D Texturing practice questions. Tap to flip, then mark Knew It or Still Learning — missed cards come back until you master them.
Read the first 7 Texture Baking & Rendering flashcards as text
What is the primary purpose of a lightmap in real-time 3D rendering?
Answer: Pre-bake static lighting data into a texture for efficient real-time use
Lightmaps pre-compute static lighting including shadows and indirect bounces into textures, allowing real-time scenes to display complex lighting without expensive runtime calculations.
What information does a thickness map store when baked from a mesh?
Answer: The distance from one surface of the mesh through to the opposite surface
A thickness map stores how thick the mesh is at each point by casting rays inward to the opposite surface, making it useful for subsurface scattering and translucency shaders.
What is the primary use of a curvature map in a PBR texturing workflow?
Answer: Driving wear effects, edge highlights, and cavity darkening procedurally
Curvature maps highlight convex edges for wear or highlights and concave cavities for dirt or darkening, making them essential for procedural smart material masks.
In Marmoset Toolbag's baking panel, what do the 'Max Frontal Distance' and 'Max Rear Distance' settings control?
Answer: How far projection rays extend forward and backward from the low-poly surface
These settings define the reach of baking rays in both directions from the low-poly cage, controlling how much of the high-poly mesh is sampled from each direction.
Why is padding (also called dilation or bleed) added around UV islands in a baked texture?
Answer: To prevent visible seam artifacts at island edges during mip-mapping and filtering
Padding extends the baked color outward from UV island edges, preventing seams from appearing as the texture is filtered or sampled at lower mip levels.
Which baking pass produces a grayscale map where concave areas like crevices and corners appear darker?
Answer: Ambient Occlusion map
An Ambient Occlusion map calculates how much ambient light reaches each point based on surrounding geometry, producing darker values in occluded crevices and corners.
Which map type stores directional lighting information that allows a surface to be relit after the bake is complete?
Answer: Directional lightmap (dominant light direction map)
A directional lightmap stores the dominant light direction at each texel alongside intensity, enabling relighting of baked surfaces while preserving shadow detail.