Workflow: Rendering to Texture (Texture Baking)

  1. Set up a scene with lighting.

    Banana object in a lighted room

  2. Select the objects whose textures you want to bake.

    Banana object selected

  3. Choose Rendering Render To Texture.
  4. A Render To Texture dialog appears. In this dialog, you choose which elements of the rendering you want to bake. Elements are aspects of the rendering such as diffuse color, shadows, alpha (transparency/opacity), and so on.

    In this dialog, you can also choose various display options for showing the baked texture in shaded viewports.

  5. Click Render.

After you click Render in the Render To Texture dialog, a number of things happen. (This is a typical set of events; the dialog gives you a lot of control over how texture baking actually occurs.)

That is texture baking in a nutshell.