I was wondering, I am confused with this certain type of rendering. I’m not sure if it’s called render layers, com-positing, or baking
and so on.
By this, I mean adding ambient occlusion to a layer, then specular and so on. I know there is normal maps, specular, displacement and occlusion maps but, do these render layers make the textures better in quality by adding render layers and baking maps and lights all together and so on? I know there’s tutorials on texture maps, but from there I’m not sure what these render layers are called, com positing, render passes and so on. I also noticed on peoples demo they do break downs so wondering if this is just layers with a normal map then diffuse and s on?
I believe you are talking about render passes (like in “making of” videos, right?)
By default, when you render an image, the final result you see is the combination of all those passes, like diffuse, glossy, shadows, AO etc. Activating the corresponding options in the render layers panel, allow you to separate some or all of them to use in compositing later.
So, for example, if you want to highlight an specific material, you can render a separate pass with pixels containing only that material and apply a glare node to it in compositing.
Baking is similar, but instead of using the final image, it calculates separate passes for textures. The goal is to avoid complex render calculations by including their result in the image textures.