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Game Development vocabulary · Rendering, Graphics & Performance

Bake

Meaning in game development, with examples

/beɪk/verbCommon term

In game development, bake means: To calculate something expensive, such as lighting, shadows or navigation data, before the game runs and save the result, so it does not need to be computed in real time.

In Turkish: bake etmek, önceden hesaplamak

How it is used

Most often heard as 'bake the lighting', which produces lightmaps. Baked lighting looks good and is cheap at runtime, but unlike real-time or dynamic lighting it cannot change. Artists also bake normal maps from high-poly models.

Example sentences

  1. Don't move any walls; I just baked the lighting for the whole level.

  2. Baked shadows look great, but they don't update when the door opens.

Common collocations

  • bake the lighting
  • baked lighting
  • bake a lightmap
  • bake normal maps
  • renderingThe process in which the computer turns a 3D or 2D scene, with its models, textures and lights, into the final image shown on the screen.
  • navmeshShort for navigation mesh: a simplified map of the walkable surfaces in a level that game AI uses to find paths and move characters around obstacles.
  • textureA 2D image wrapped around a 3D model to give it color and surface detail, such as wood grain, skin or rust. Extra textures can control shine, bumps and roughness.
  • optimizationWork that makes a game run faster and use less memory, battery or bandwidth, for example by simplifying models, reducing draw calls or rewriting slow code.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Rendering, Graphics & Performance

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