Introduction to Cycles Baking
Why Blender Stack Exchange recommends it
Blender Stack Exchange answerers point people to it as the standard walkthrough for Cycles baking, including image node setup, prebaked lighting, and speeding up renders.
Recommended by 11 people across 11 different months, 2014 to 2019.
What it is
A 2014 Blender Guru tutorial by Andrew Price introducing Cycles baking, which stores calculated lighting and shading data into image textures on a mesh. It walks through UV unwrapping, creating a target image, and baking so scenes render faster or work in games and real-time viewers.
What people said
Recommends redonwhite · 2015-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How to pick target texture image for baking?”
I had a similar problem and the solution was to select the target image in the Node Editor . This sometimes means you have to add a new node containing the target image (previously created and unwrapped in the UV/Image Editor). I'm attaching the setup I'm using for baking color texture into another one with separate UV mapping. Note the target texture is selected (orange border). [LINK] This tutorial shows it done, I'm linking directly to the part where they create the image and the node: [this video]
Recommends Rcprobot · 2015-10 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Problem with scaling uv's to tile textures at the right size”
got it just needed to scale with the mapping node this tutorial explained everything if anyone else comes looking for this issue [this video]
Recommends MSchmits · 2016-01 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Cycles - How can I render only pre-baked textures, and not calculate shadows?”
You have to setup a material using all these baked textures and instead of a diffuse shader you have to use an emission shader. This video show the technique very well: [this video] Don't be fooled by the title (cause you said you already know how to bake)
Recommends kim holder · 2016-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “How do you bake several materials onto one object in Cycles Render?”
I am able to bake objects with one material, but when there is more than one, an error comes up: No active image found in material "blah-blah" . Most materials are used on many different objects, so I made each one a single user copy (clicking the number beside the material name field in Properties > Materials and renaming it descriptively). That didn't resolve it though. I have been following the steps in this Blender Guru video [this video] (which explains how to bake the lighting onto an object's surface so it takes much less rendering to display it in an app like Sketchfab, or so you can work on it displayed in Render mode in real time): UV unwrap > create and name image > add Image Texture >
Recommends m.ardito · 2016-11 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Is it possible to move the camera, after rendering the scene, through keyboard input as you would move a character in a video game?”
I think the answer to your question is "no". You can't "walk" into a render, whatever method (or program) you use to render. A "render" is a non-interactive image (or a sequence of for an animation render), so the best you can do with an image is zoom, pan, but you can't do what you asked. What you wish to do (ie: walking into the scene with some WASD keys setup) needs an interactive scene, aka a "game". Blender "game engine" allows to create interactives scenes but, as you discovered, this "game engine" uses "blender internal" material types. The "game engine" is there since many years, well before cycles renderer came, and it is also understandable that it uses "blender internal" materials
Recommends MCunha · 2017-02 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Minimizing number of vertices in models for usage in games”
You might consider to learn no retopology (to lower your polycount). Afterwards, you bake your colour map, normal map, displacement map, etc from your high poly models to your low poly models. If you apply the kind of maps/textures to your low poly models, they will look high poly. See these 2 videos, so you understand better what i'm saying: [LINK] and [LINK] and on baking: [this video]
Recommends Pascal Nardi · 2017-05 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Merging Textures into Diffuse”
the only way is to use the "combined" option of the cycles baking tool, after setting up the material with gloss, normals etc. then chose the image to bake to and click bake. There are a lot of tutorials on cycles baking out there ( [this video] )
Recommends GeriatricJacob · 2018-05 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “Rendering taking too long. Is there a way to improve it?”
There are several ways to speed up render times. Enable auto tile addon to set tile size correctly. User preferences => Addons => Enable Render: Auto Tile Size => Save Settings By utilizing denoising you should be able to decrease render samples. Scene tab => Check denoising box Bake your materials. Its too complex to explain here, so check out this [this video] tutorial.
Recommends Alejandro Torres · 2018-07 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “What does "self lit" mean, and why is it a good thing?”
It refers to models that already have the lights prebaked using lightmaps or pre-render all the model and bake it into a texture. Both are useful for real-time visualization of static scenes, since it can show photorrealistic results without have to render everything everytime. You can get more information about in the links below: Lightmap: [LINK] Baking: [this video]
Recommends sorenfroststaal · 2018-08 · Blender Stack Exchange · on “"Circular reference in texture stack" when baking texture, except target texture not in tree”
When baking in cycles you will have to have a unconnected blank image texture SELECTED in the cycles materials. This is where Blender bakes to.. have you followed this step? also you could check this video, which still is useable as far as I remember [this video]