3D Texturing Texture Baking & Rendering 3

Question 1

What is a world-space position map primarily used for in game engine shader workflows?

Accepted Answer

Allowing shaders to use 3D world position data for effects like gradient masks and VFX

Answer

Storing UV coordinates of each mesh vertex for export

Answer

Capturing bone weights for skeletal mesh animation systems

Answer

Defining depth-of-field blur based on camera distance per pixel

Question 2

What does 'exploding' a mesh mean in the context of texture baking?

Accepted Answer

Separating mesh parts by moving them apart so they don't interfere during baking

Answer

Increasing polygon density on the high-poly to capture finer surface detail

Answer

Breaking down a complex mesh into individual UV UDIM tiles

Answer

Splitting the mesh along UV seams for improved unwrap quality

Question 3

What is the most common power-of-two texture resolution used when baking game asset textures?

Accepted Answer

2048x2048

Answer

512x1024

Answer

768x768

Answer

3000x3000

Question 4

What is a 'shadow terminator' artifact in the context of normal map baking?

Accepted Answer

A jagged or incorrect shadow boundary from geometric shading normal mismatch

Answer

A dark UV seam border caused by incorrect UV island padding

Answer

An artifact where normals bake inverted on mirrored UV islands

Answer

Noise in AO maps caused by insufficient ray sample count

Question 5

What is the purpose of a bent normal map in a physically based shading workflow?

Accepted Answer

Encoding the average unoccluded ambient light direction per texel for accurate AO shading

Answer

Storing vertex color data for blend shape or morph target animations

Answer

Correcting UV distortion in curved or stretched mesh regions

Answer

Mapping high-frequency sculpt detail onto game meshes as displacement

Question 6

What does 'Mikk tangent space' refer to in the context of normal mapping?

Accepted Answer

A standardized tangent basis algorithm ensuring consistent normal map results across tools

Answer

A UV projection method using spherical coordinate unwrapping

Answer

A normal map mode that operates in object space instead of tangent space

Answer

A baking mode that uses multiple cage meshes simultaneously for complex assets

Question 7

Which rendering technique pre-calculates global illumination for static scene objects and stores the result in textures?

Accepted Answer

Lightmap baking

Answer

Screen-Space Ambient Occlusion (SSAO)

Answer

Real-time hardware ray tracing

Answer

Deferred rendering pipeline