Map Baking

This is the tutorial on map baking in Maya. During the tutorial, I learned mainly about normal maps, id maps, and ambient occlusion maps.

To start, I move all the pieces of the revolver far from each other.

Next, I selected faces and changed colors according to the different materials the object would have, to differentiate them.

This is when the color coding is mostly done. I still have yet to do a couple small parts, but this is mostly done. From here, I will move on to maps.

Here's the menu with settings for the maps. Basically, you pick the geometry you want to have the maps, pick the geometry that will be the source, pick a map type, and then set the other settings according to what you want done.

This is after a map was applied, with the high-poly model hidden.

Here is the low-poly model after having an id map and a normal map assigned to it. It shows some of the more fine detail while still keeping a low poly count. Incredibly useful.

This is after applying the final map, the ambient occlusion map.

Overall, learning maps has been very interesting. So far in my work I've never really considered poly-count and using maps to preserve detail while keeping the poly count lower. I am very interested in the ambient occlusion map because it can make your models look wonderful without being textured. I've seen tons of models online that look to have a physical, almost plastic quality that looks great. If i understand correctly, they're just models rendered with ambient occlusion, so I will definitely be experimenting more with that.