What about this baking deal?

[Stonecutter]

I don't know how many other people don't get this baking thing, but I know I don't...
:confused:
What are the pros vs. the cons? I asked a good buddy the question, but thought maybe I should ask here, so others might also gain the knowledge that I seek. I have only had one experience trying it, and it cost me a file. Since this program is so outrageously good at what it does, I figure that it was my mistake that cost me the file.
With all the ZExperts here, I'm hoping everybody would benefit from their input. So,
how about baking as a topic?

[webmister]

so you want to know about baking do ya?
let's say were going to make meat loaf.
first of all PRE heat your oven at 425 degree
get 3 pounds of ground round and form it ovel shape and place it in a oven dish make sure you wash your hands before starting.
slap it in the oven and in about 45 miniutes WALLA you know all about BAKING lol
Joking im sure some one will come along and give you a hand..

[aurick]

Hey, Stonecutter!

The baking used to confuse me, too, but once you understand what it does, it's incredibly useful.

In short, it takes everything on the layer and converts it to the Flat Color material with all colors permanently fixed as you see them at the time of baking. In other words, any color that you see in your image that is caused by your various materials and their settings now becomes fixed so that changing those material settings doesn't affect the image.

As you probably know, materials in ZBrush remain "live," even after objects are snapshot to the canvas. That way, if you decide part way through creating your scene that your rocks (for example) need a bit more striation in them or less diffusion, you can change the material modifiers and affect your scene.

But what if you want to use a variation of the material for something else without changing what you've already created? Or maybe you're getting ready to use a tool that draws information from whatever you're drawing on (like the fiber brush) and every time you try to apply it, the material already in the scene interacts negatively with your new tool. Or maybe you're drawing on another layer and using the Picker to take the color from the this one, but can't figure out why the color that it's giving you doesn't match the color that you can clearly see in the scene (that's because the color you see is caused by the material modifiers, and the Picker is seeing the color that you used to draw the object, itself).

In these cases -- among others -- baking the layer can solve the problem. By turning the layer into the Flat Color material, it frees up your materials for modified use in other elements and converts all material-generated "wild" coloration into true fixed colors.

Now, the catch to all of this is that baking the layer converts everything that you can see at the time of baking into the Flat Color material on the layer that you bake. I'm guessing (from personal experience) that this is how you probably had your file ruined. What happens is that color info from all visible layers gets transferred to your current layer, too. So it's a good idea before baking to turn off all of your other layers, then turn them on again after baking.

Hope that helps you out! Like I said, I didn't understand the concept at first, either. But once I finally figured out what was happening, I now hardly ever create a scene without doing it at least once, if not several times. As a rule, whenever I know that I am done with the parts of a scene that I'm creating with any particular material, I bake the layer immediately. A good example of why is The Memory Box (http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=001253), where each seashell was created using variations of the same material. I created one shell, baked the layer, modified the material, created another shell, baked again, etc. And if you ran the Vegetation tutorial, you also saw how baking is useful there, too. Baking also frees your system resources up, since ZBrush no longer has to keep track of all the complex material mathematics at work in the layer.

If anyone else has something to add, please share! I'm sure that there are other uses for baking that I haven't even thought of.

Cheers!

[Stonecutter]

Hey Aurick, that was very clear! What happened with my file, is that it became un-loadable when I baked a layer, and I know for a fact that I hadn't closed any layers.
Thanx for the input... :D :D :D
You've made my next move much less filled with paranoia...
Mucho appreciated, man!! :tu: :tu: :tu:

[Kruzr]

Hi Stonecutter & Aurick . . . :)

I agree with everything that Aurick has already stated. The only thing I can add to this, is once you "Bake" a layer, it will not receive any shadows from other objects or other layers. So the best thing to do is, if you plan on having shadows cast on anything on that layer, then do the "Best" render, with shadows enabled, before you bake it. You can place "Markers" on the other layers where the objects are casting shadows, after baking the primary layer you can clear everything in the shadow casting layer, then re-apply the objects using the markers & edit the Materials on those objects how ever you want. ;)

I hope this makes sense to you? :confused:

Have a good one guys . . . :cool: Mark.

[Muvlo]

If anyone's interested, I found an interesting tip from ZuZu in the quicklinks:
Lots of lights (http://www.pixolator.com/zbc-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=1&t=000517).
:)

[boozy floozie]

Stonecutter,thanks for asking that question.
I was to frightened to put my hand up.
It had always confused the heck out of me too.

I was hoping for divine enlightenment regarding this issue.
Thanks to Yogi Aurick and Yogi Kruzr once again for walking us learners through the oft dark forest of Zedbrushania.

Yours on a slow climb,on an uphill learning curve wearing vaselined slippers...etc etc

The Flooze
:)

[Pixolator]

Excellent information has already been posted above (Thanks! :) ).
I’ll add a bit more info and a pictorial representation of the rendering process…


http://www.pixolator.com/images01/BakingDiag.jpg
When drawing with a ZBrush tool (in this case a 3Dsphere tool), ZBrush is writing information into several channels…

First is the COLOR channel which is composed of three separate channels (Red,Green,Blue), When drawing an un-textured sphere, ZBrush is simply drawing a circle into the this channel. You can, at any time, switch to FLAT render mode in order to see the source/unshaded colors of each Pixol (in this case, you’ll see a circle)
Next is the Material channel that contains the index of the material used in each of the drawn Pixols.
Last (and absolutely not least) is the Depth (Z) channel, which contains the depth (elevation) of each of the drawn Pixols.

The rendering engine uses all these channels (including lights/environment effects) when calculating the final/shaded color of each Pixol, this calculation is done in real time and allows you to see a 3D representation of your brush strokes.

What is BAKING ?
Baking simply allows you to transfer (copy/blend) the final/shaded image into the base/unshaded COLOR (RGB) channel. The amount of ‘baking’ is controlled by the LAYER ::MODIFIERS ::B BLEND , when this value is set to 100%, the full impact of each of the materials that is used in your image will be transferred to the source color (baking) and the canvas will be filled with the "Flat Color" material . When the value is less than 100% , a proportional amount of the shading will be transferred to the source image but in this case, each Pixol will still retain its material designation (this will usually results in the image getting darker due to double shading.)

I hope that this is not too confusing,
-Pixolator

P.S. Stonecutter : If you are interested, you may email me your un-loadable file and I’ll try to change its status to a loadable file :).

[aurick]

Pixolator, one of your pictures is worth a thousand of my words. You should put that chart in the manual!

It's clear that I need to start experimenting with partial baking, too...

(making note to self in thick book of things still to learn about ZBrush)

[eddski]

ahh ic...kinda like flattening layers in pshop.....well sorta....thanks guys!

[Wordsmith]

If I might humbly add a point that was important to me in my last piece of work, and takes off from what Kruzr was saying.

I needed to make sure my foreground image (the woman) did not cast any shadows on the background (the moon) or it would have looked a bit suspect in my depth. So, I baked the background to keep the shadows from appearing where they normally never would. I hope that came out right.

Word.