A way to render out multiple materials & shaders to a single texture, which can include scene lighting and shadows and complicated materials. If the scene is static, its an excellent way to get high quality lighting and texturing for realtime games. 

 

 

 

Texture baking from Max5, using the Radiosity renderer.

"texture Baking" is the process of rendering the multiple lights, shadows and texures onto the scene, as you would see them in a rendered scene.

I baked a texture on each individual model, then exported to gamestudio.

The scene has no real light sources during play...

 

Baked in maps add a level of detail that comes closer to photoreal, plus it looks cool as hell.

 

 

 

 

 

* artifacts are from compressed web image, not texture...