Baking Maps In Blender: A Step-By-Step Guide

Baking maps in Blender is a process that can be used to speed up rendering times, improve performance, and export models to other programs. It involves taking all the materials on one or several objects and condensing them into image maps. This can be done for multiple objects to create a single material that can be used across all objects. Blender offers a few different types of baking, including baking textures, normals, and ambient occlusion. The process of baking maps in Blender can be complex and time-consuming, but it is a useful tool for improving performance and compatibility with other software.

Baking textures for export to game engines

Baking textures is an essential technique in 3D content creation pipelines. It allows artists to render complex materials, textures, and effects into a simple 2D image map that can be exported and used in game engines. The process involves baking the textures of a high-resolution model onto a low-resolution model, creating lightweight textures that are optimised for export and reducing memory loads.

Before baking, models must have proper UV mappings and materials assigned. This setup stage impacts the quality and efficiency of the bake. Clean, non-overlapping UVs are essential to ensure successful bakes. It is also important to assign materials and image textures before baking so that the render output has sources to bake from.

The baking process can be broken down into three core steps: setting up the bake, choosing bake settings, and executing the bake. During the setup, it is crucial to configure the output texture and destination, such as creating a new image texture to store the baked result and setting the bake destination to "Image Texture". When choosing bake settings, you determine which attributes to bake out, such as diffuse, normals, emissivity, and more. Finally, executing the bake involves running the ray tracing pass and recording the output to the target texture.

Baking provides several benefits for exporting to game engines. It reduces texture memory usage by condensing complex materials into simple 2D texture maps. It also allows for the baking of complex materials into textures, rendering intricate shader node networks into a single 2D image. Additionally, baking exports clean and efficient textures, optimising them for external applications.

When baking for export to game engines, it is important to consider the specific requirements of the engine. For example, game engines typically prefer PNG formats for diffuse and normal maps, while 3D printing may use higher-quality EXR or HDR images. It is also crucial to adjust compression levels, scale texture dimensions, and choose the appropriate file formats to ensure compatibility and optimise performance.

By understanding the baking process and tailoring the output for the specific requirements of game engines, artists can create efficient and compatible textures for their projects.

Baking ambient occlusion for texture painting

Baking in Blender is the act of pre-computing something to speed up the rendering process later on. This is especially useful when rendering long animations, as the time spent baking can be much less than the time spent rendering each frame.

To bake ambient occlusion for texture painting, you must first UV unwrap the model so that the texture can be baked. This can be done manually or automatically, depending on your needs.

Next, set the material to pure white if desired. This step is important if you plan to use the ambient occlusion map as an overlay in a diffuse texture. By default, the ambient occlusion texture bake will include the colour of the surface, which is a grey default. To change this, go to the Material tab and adjust the colour and intensity to 1.000.

Then, under the World tab, enable Ambient Occlusion and set the Samples under the Gather section to your desired number. A higher number will result in higher lightmap quality but will also increase the bake time.

After that, go to the Render tab and set the Bake Mode to Ambient Occlusion. Hit the Bake button and wait for the process to finish. You can watch the progress in the UV/Image Editor and through the progress bar at the top of Blender.

Once it is done, exit Edit Mode and set the Viewport Shading to Texture. You can now see your model with ambient occlusion. Finally, export the texture from the UV/Image Editor.

Creating light maps to speed up rendering

Creating light maps can significantly speed up rendering in Blender, especially for scenes with complex lighting setups or intricate shadow interactions. This process involves baking lighting and shadow elements into textures or lightmaps, which can then be directly applied to objects. This eliminates the need for real-time light calculations during rendering, reducing the overall render time.

To create light maps in Blender, follow these general steps:

• Set up your scene: Ensure that the objects to be processed are appropriately lit. Consider the intended use of the final assets and adjust the lighting accordingly.
• Prepare your objects: Unwrap the UVs of the objects and create a dedicated texture slot that will host the rendered image. This additional material node can be added to or included within existing materials.
• Bake the lighting: Use the "Bake" feature in Blender to bake the lighting information into the textures. You can choose between baking shadows and lighting or creating colour-tinted light maps by capturing the light as it appears in the scene.
• Optimise and apply the light maps: Save the baked light maps and apply them to your objects. You may need to adjust the UV mapping and material settings to ensure the light maps are applied correctly.

Creating light maps can be a complex process, and it may require some experimentation to achieve the desired results. It is important to strike a balance between rendering speed and visual quality, as excessive optimisation may impact the final output.

Bake directly from a multires object

Baking in Blender is the act of pre-computing something to speed up the rendering process later on. It creates 2D bitmap images of a mesh object's rendered surface, which can then be remapped onto the object using its UV coordinates. Baking is done for each individual mesh and can only be done if the mesh has been UV-unwrapped.

To bake directly from a multires object, you should first unwrap your mesh with images assigned to each face. When you are ready to bake, go to the Bake panel in the Render buttons. Select either Normals or Displacement from the Bake Method field; this will reveal a new option called Bake from Multires. Select this option and then bake your model by clicking the Bake button.

Baking happens from the highest multiresolution level to the viewport level. This means the baked texture should be applied to a mesh with the same subdivision level as the Preview level of multires when you were baking the texture. If these levels do not match, the rendered result will be incorrect.

It is important to note that baking from a multires object has some limitations. For example, the Selected to Active and Split options are not available for this type of baker. Additionally, baking can only be done from a mesh with a multiresolution modifier at the top of the modifiers stack. If there is no multiresolution modifier at the top or the subdivision level is set to 0, baking will not occur.

Bake normals to an RGB image

Normals can be baked in different spaces, depending on the transformation and deformation of the object. The options are:

• Normals in world coordinates, which are dependent on object transformation and deformation.
• Normals in object coordinates, which are independent of object transformation but dependent on deformation.
• Normals in tangent space coordinates, which are independent of both object transformation and deformation. This is the default option and the best choice for animated objects.

The steps to bake normals to an RGB image are as follows:

• UV unwrap a high-resolution, finely sculpted mesh.
• Bake the normals of the high-resolution mesh.
• Save the normal map.
• UV unwrap a low-resolution mesh in a similar way to the high-resolution mesh.
• Map the normal map to the low-resolution mesh using a common coordinate system.
• Ensure the coordinate systems of the two objects match.

When baking normals to an RGB image, it is important to set the colour space to 'non-colour' in the image editor. This is because normal maps are 'non-colour' data. For 32-bit float images, Blender will likely default the colour space to 'linear'. However, it is recommended to use 'non-colour' space for normal maps.

Additionally, when baking normals, it is important to use a 32-bit image rather than the default 8-bit image. This is because 8-bit images can result in problems such as swirly mosaic tiled artefacts.

Frequently asked questions