What you’ll learn
- Why high poly and low poly exist, and what a bake is actually doing
- Cutting exact, round, quad-only holes by tracing a reference primitive instead of cutting freehand
- Adding geometry only where the detail is, with Swift Loop and its equivalents
- The three-point rule: why a hard corner needs at least three vertices across it to survive subdivision
- Working on a quarter of an object and letting symmetry do the rest
- Instances and arrays so one edit propagates, and the instancing trap that breaks an attach
- Preparing a high/low pair and setting the cage so the projection lands
- Reading a failed bake, then wiring normal, occlusion and diffuse back into the material
Who it’s for
Modellers moving from viewport-pretty to production-ready, and anyone who has never baked a map. No 3ds Max experience required.
Requirements
Any 3D package that can bake maps from a high-poly to a low-poly model (3ds Max, Maya, Blender or Cinema 4D).
Why this course looks the way it does
This started life as a tutorial I recorded years ago, in Italian, and then left in a drawer. Going back through it recently, the thinking still holds up, the software has moved on, the approach hasn’t. That felt worth putting out rather than leaving on a hard drive. So, plainly, before you start:
The picture is older than my current work. It was captured years ago at 720p, which is what screens ran at then. Everything I record now is 1080p. It is not up to the standard of the paid courses in the library, and I’d rather tell you than have you notice it thirty seconds in. What’s on screen is a real working session, not a polished re-shoot.
The voice is not me speaking, it’s an AI trained on my voice. The original narration is Italian. Rather than re-record hours of material, or leave it to Italian speakers only, I used a voice model trained on my own to re-dub it. The teaching, the decisions and the demonstration are mine; only the delivery is synthetic. The paid courses are narrated by me, in person.
The method is why it’s here. Tools change every year; how you decide to approach an object doesn’t. That transfers to any package and any version.
It’s free, start to finish. No preview-then-paywall. All 6 lessons, all the way through.