This texture allows you to bake an arbitrary texture into an image and make use of Procedural textures in displacement mapping. The baking uses the texture preview system, and then the texture appears like an image texture to the rest of the system. The baking is done whenever an input changes, and baking is calculated on-the-fly. The internal image is not stored in the project, so it needs recalculating whenever you load the project. You can access the Baking texture node by right-clicking in the Nodegraph Editor and selecting Baking Texture from the TexturesTextures are used to add details to a surface. Textures can be procedural or imported raster files. menu item (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Selecting the Baking Texture node from the pop-up context menu of the Nodegraph Editor
With this Texture node, you can utilize the full power of Procedural textures and combine them with DisplacementThe process of utilizing a 2D texture map to generate 3D surface relief. As opposed to bump and normal mapping, Displacement mapping does not only provide the illusion of depth but it effectively displaces the actual geometric position of points over the textured surface., which makes it easy to create alien landscapes like this:
In OctaneRender®, Displacement cannot utilize a Procedural texture map. This Texture node provides a way to bake Procedural textures into an image to use as a Displacement map.
In the following example, Displacement uses the Turbulence procedural texture by connecting it to the Baking texture node before connecting it to the Displacement node (Figure 2).
Figure 2: The Turbulence node used for Displacement by filtering it through the Baking texture node