Baking for Scans

Baking is an integral part of the scan and high-poly pipeline. A scanned or sculpted trunk carries its detail in the mesh; baking moves that detail onto texture maps so the geometry can stay lean and so procedural growth can stitch onto it cleanly. This page is the workflow side: how to use the baker for the common scan tasks. For the bake reference (the channels, the ray-cast method, resolution, and gotchas), see Baking.

Bake tiling textures

When the input is a tubular section from Scan to Tube or a square patch from Scan to Patch, the Bake node's tiling mode produces textures that wrap or tile cleanly. These are used for the boundary blend at the procedural-extension stitch, and as general material inputs for surfaces that need to repeat.

Step-by-step pending.

Bake high-poly meshes

Before procedural extension or game-engine export, the high-poly scan or sculpt is baked onto a leaner target: the bake captures colour, normal (in MikkT space), height, and ambient occlusion onto the target's UVs. The target is usually the trunk-extension graft mesh from Create Graft Mesh, or a purpose-built low-poly for export.

Step-by-step pending.

Injecting tiling textures

At the boundary where procedural growth meets the static scanned base, the tiling textures are injected so the seam is invisible: the procedural surface and the scanned surface share a blended, tiling material across the stitch. This is the step that makes a scan-plus-growth trunk read as one continuous piece.

Step-by-step pending.

Related

• Baking, the bake reference (channels, method, gotchas).
• Trunk Extension, the flagship workflow this baking feeds.
• Bake, Scan to Tube, Scan to Patch, Create Graft Mesh, the nodes involved.