Baking... a picture

[Neogobius]

:qu: What is BAKING for?
:qu: When and why should I BAKE my picture?
:qu: What is the difference between BAKED and not BAKED picture?

[rtyer]

I'm a new kid on the block and you will probably pick up better answers, but in case eveyone is working, I'll give it a shot.
When you paint with zbrush,you can manipulate many things at once
When painting, your stoke controls material (and all the elements included)color,depth,Position etc.
What Bake does is remove most of the information and leave you with a flat color and the shades.
In essence changing 3d to 2d.
The command is located in the layer section and applied to the layer selected.
You are probably worse off now than when you asked the question. With any kind of luck there will be 5 more posts under this one telling me how wrong I am or elaborating.
Luck

[zerebrush]

rtyer is not wrong, that is why my description - you can do without!!


(I don't like this at all, because:
-baking is for to change substances from raw to eatable
-you should NEVER bake your picture because you could not digest it, no matter how you bake
-a nonbaked picture is nice to look on, you can even hang it on walls and stuff - a baked picture is good for------nothing

But, PLEASE, don't take that serious - I made it all up :D :D )

[Neogobius]

Rtyer, thank you!

Zerebrush: And what about using mixer and adding some strawberries? :D I know, I know... after using the mixer you can not hang up your picture on the wall. But you can splash it!! :D

[rtyer]

I forgot the preheat oven part.

[zerebrush]

:D :D :D !!!!

[Jaycephus]

Baking is very useful in certain circumstances. For one thing, you don't have to keep doing Final renders to see what everything looks like with ultimate shadow settings, etc.

Basically, when you have the materials, lighting, etc. like you want, and you want to do some 'post work' using the 2D and 2.5D tools, you would generally want to (or need to) bake the scene.

Baking retains the color of a pixol after all lighting, material, fog, Anti-aliasing(?), etc. has been applied, but then switches the material to Flat Color. The Pixols still retain their depth information, but the color and material information has been changed. In order to do true post-work in ZBrush, like you would in Photoshop, you generally have to bake. However, since the depth information is still present and modifiable on a per-pixol basis, you can accomplish true 2.5D effects, as well as 2D editing, and many standard image filter effects.

[Neogobius]

Thanks!!! :)