Baking

Baking means pre-computing complex data — surface normals, lighting, ambient occlusion — and storing it in a texture map. The baked texture is then applied to a simpler mesh, giving it the appearance of the original high-detail source at a fraction of the rendering cost.

In Blender, set up your high-poly and low-poly meshes with matching UV layouts, select both (high-poly active last), open the Render Properties panel, choose Cycles as the renderer, set the bake type to Normal, and click Bake. The result is saved to the image texture node on the low-poly material.

Game engines render millions of polygons in real time, so high-poly sculpts are too expensive to use directly. Baking transfers the sculpt's detail into a texture that the engine applies to a lightweight low-poly mesh, preserving visual quality while keeping the polygon count manageable.

Common bake outputs include normal maps that transfer high-poly surface detail, ambient occlusion, curvature, thickness, position, and full lightmaps. Texturing tools also bake color ID and material masks. Each map captures a different property of the source geometry or lighting into a reusable texture.

A cage is an expanded copy of the low-poly mesh that defines the outer limit from which rays are cast toward the high-poly source during baking. A well-fitted cage prevents the intersecting or skewed rays that cause seams and artifacts in the baked map. Most baking tools generate a cage automatically or let you edit one manually.

Seams usually come from mismatched UV islands, a poorly fitting cage, or overlapping geometry that confuses the ray projection. Fixes include adding padding around UV islands, adjusting the cage distance, splitting hard edges along UV seams, and increasing the ray distance so the high-poly surface is fully captured.

Baking textures pre-computes surface or lighting data into an image map. Baking animation converts procedural or simulated motion, like physics or constraints, into explicit keyframes on every frame. Both share the idea of pre-computing an expensive result, but they operate on completely different data.

Substance Painter bakes maps directly inside its texturing workflow, which is convenient when you texture in the same tool. Marmoset Toolbag offers a dedicated, highly controllable baker with real-time preview and skew painting, which many artists prefer for difficult high-to-low bakes. Both produce industry-standard results.

Meshy bakes normal and PBR maps automatically during generation, so the output mesh already carries surface detail without a manual bake pass. If you retopologize or create custom UVs, you can re-bake using Meshy's exported high-resolution textures as the source.