Baking the initial base colour

Now were ready to bake the current texture and paint more details to it in photoshop, if your having trouble with baking the texture make sure to take a quick look at the reference files for 3d max, open the render to texture feature in the rendering menu, add the diffuse map, change the channel to channel 1 because that's were all of the unwrapping information is in but the size on the image depends on you, think about how much space will the leaf take of the screen when you make your final render, if its going to take about an area of 512x512 in your final render than you can make the size of the texture 1024x1024 to make sure none of the areas look blurry and to maintain a rather high level of detail in the textures, if your render is going to be much higher resolution and the leaf might use 1024x1024 pixels in the image than you might want to go as high as 2048x2048 but before you click render make sure your output file is a tga because it will have a transparent background we wont have to worry about separating the leaf with selection tools, I would recommend using 2048x2048 because that's the resolution I'm going to be using and in the painting sections I might give brush specifications that are the accurate pixel size for my canvas but might be smaller if you use a higher resolution image or the brush might be too big if you use a lower resolution image.

Before we start baking we need to make the material self illuminated otherwise you will see that some parts of the leaf may have highlights and other portions will be in shadow and that's not what we want for our baked texture, a quick way to do that is to add an output map the self illumination channel. Right now if you bake the texture you will see that the vain of the leaf does not show up, a quick way to go over this is to bake another texture but this time with wireframe checked in the material basic parameters in the material editor, baking a wireframe will also help remind us the exact position of certain details in the leaf when painting in photoshop, now disable mesh smooth in the leaf's modify panel and start baking the textures. Here's a screen of the baked color map and the baked wireframe map that we will use as reference in future sections.