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Map Baking Techniques for Games in 3ds Max

by Joshua Kinney

Video games are highly reliant on special maps like normal maps, ID masks, and ambient occlusion maps. So, in this series of 3ds Max tutorials, we'll discuss map baking techniques for games in 3ds Max. Software required: 3ds Max 2015.

What you'll learn

Video games are highly reliant on special maps like normal maps, ID masks, and ambient occlusion maps. So, in this series of 3ds Max tutorials, we'll discuss map baking techniques for games in 3ds Max. We'll first cover the basic workflow for baking maps in 3ds Max. We'll talk about why we need to explode our meshes and how to begin setting up materials for our ID mask. Then we'll learn how to properly set up a projection that will gather our high-poly detail and bake it into our maps. After that, we'll learn how to set up a scene for baking an ambient occlusion map. Finally, we'll end this 3ds Max training on how to overcome common errors in our bakes, like waviness and normal map gaps. Software required: 3ds Max 2015.

About the author

Joshua is a devoted games author at Pluralsight. For years Joshua has been a key author behind Digital-Tutors' (now a Pluralsight company) popular game engine training. As a kid, he had a passion for playing video games, which eventually developed into a fascination with the process of game creation. The question of "How'd they do that?" led Joshua on a quest to learn to make these games himself. Ever since then, Joshua has devoted his life to creating games, as well as teaching others to build ... more

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