DocsBake every map
Bake every map at once
New in 1.0.8 Baking turns a material, however its nodes build it, into plain image files a game engine or another app can read. Bake maps… bakes every map a material uses in one job, as a texture set packed for Unreal, Unity or glTF.
What it makes#
A PBR material (the usual kind for games and real-time engines) is described by a few maps: images for its color, how metallic and how rough it is, its surface detail and so on. Together, one object's maps are its texture set. In Blender you bake them one at a time, each into an image node you set up yourself. Bake maps… bakes the whole set in one job, using the object's UV map (how its surface is laid flat onto the image).
It reads any node tree: image textures, math and procedural nodes, Mix and Add Shaders and node groups are all baked as Cycles would render them. A shader node Angelo doesn't know is read approximately, and the approval says which. On the GPU, a texture set bakes in 27–40% less time than stock Blender baking the same maps one at a time (measured at 2K).
Bake a texture set, step by step#
- Select one or more meshes that have UVs and materials. The active object is listed first.
- In the chat bar, click + and, under Create, open Render ▸ Bake maps… (or press F3 and type Bake Maps). The Bake every map card opens.
- Leave Every map the materials use on, or turn it off and tick the maps you want.
- Choose a Size (1K to 8K, 2K by default), a File format (PNG or OpenEXR), a Margin (how far colors spread past each UV island's edge, 16 px by default) and a Packing for where the maps are going.
- Click Bake. Your click is the approval. The card moves to the corner with its progress; keep working, or click Stop to stop and discard it.
- When it says Your texture set is ready, Open Folder shows the files. If you left Make a baked material on, Use Baked Material puts a new material wired to the maps on your objects, as one Undo step.
Which maps#
With Every map the materials use on, each object gets:
- Base color, metallic and roughness, always.
- Emission and alpha (transparency) where the material isn't black and fully opaque everywhere.
- Normal (surface detail, in OpenGL style) where a shader's Normal input is connected or a bump is set.
- Height where a Displacement node feeds the Material Output.
- Ambient occlusion (soft contact shadows) where the packing has a place for it.
With Separate maps, a material that is metallic nowhere gets no metallic file. A map that is one value everywhere is filled in, not baked.
Packing for your engine#
Packing puts several gray maps into the color channels of one image, as engines expect them:
| Packing | What you get |
|---|---|
| Separate maps | One file per map. The default. |
| ORM packed | Base color with alpha, and one image with occlusion, roughness and metallic in red, green and blue. |
| glTF metallic-roughness | The same layout as glTF's occlusion-roughness-metallic texture. |
| Unreal Engine | ORM packing with a DirectX-style normal map (green flipped). |
| Unity | A base map and a mask map: metallic, occlusion, an empty detail mask, and smoothness (one minus roughness). |
Files are PNG, 8-bit with normal and height at 16-bit (16 bits for every map makes them all 16-bit), or OpenEXR with linear values. Each file is named after its object and map; a UDIM file adds its tile number.
A PNG can't hold emission brighter than 1 or a height below 0, so Angelo scales them into the file; the baked material puts the strength and displacement back.
UDIM tiles and high to low#
UDIM tiles. UDIM spreads one object's UVs over several numbered image tiles for more detail. When an object's UVs reach past the first tile, every tile its faces use is baked, one file per tile and map, up to 100 tiles.
High to low. With several objects selected, choose High to low to bake the others (often a detailed sculpt) onto the active object (a lighter version for real time). The card says what bakes onto what; it uses the scene's cage and extrusion settings from Blender's Bake panel. Every map is read from the detailed objects, and normal, height and ambient occlusion are always included.
What stays the same#
- Nothing of yours is written: each bake goes into a temporary image with temporary nodes beside yours, removed when it ends. A file saved mid-bake is cleaned up the next time it opens.
- Stop removes everything the bake added and keeps no files.
- Files go into the chat's folder: next to your saved .blend file, or Angelo's own folder for the chat while the file is unsaved. A name that is taken gets the next free one.
- The bake is refused before it starts, with the reason, for an object without a material or with an empty material slot, a linked material, UVs in no tile or in more than 100, two objects with the same name, or a bake larger than half your computer's memory.
You can also ask the agent to bake a texture set. Like every bake it starts, it asks first, and the approval lists each object's maps, the packing, how many files it writes and any UDIM tiles.