Bake Scene

This add-on bakes your scene to textures. This is useful in many situations:

• Creating trim sheets
• Creating decals
• Creating hair cards
• Creating terrain
• Creating skyboxes
• Creating HDRIs

The textures are baked super fast, they are anti-aliased, and they are extremely high quality.

Installation

1. Go to the Releases page and download the most recent Bake.Scene.zip file.

2. In Blender, go to Edit -> Preferences...

3. In the Add-ons tab, click the Install... button.

4. Select the Bake.Scene.zip file and click Install Add-on.

5. Enable the checkbox to the left of Render: Bake Scene.

6. Save your preferences.

How to use

1. In the Output properties, change the resolution. 2048 or 4096 is most common:

   

2. Change the output folder and image settings to whatever you want, then click the Bake button:

   

3. By default it will bake geometry textures (alpha, ambient occlusion, curvature, normal, and height).

   But you can change that inside of the Textures panel:

   

4. If you want to bake an HDRI or skybox, change the Type to HDRI. You should also enable the Render option in the Textures panel:

   

   You must change the renderer to Cycles, save the textures as OpenEXR or RadianceHDR, and the image height must be half the size of the width (e.g. 4096 x 2048):

   

Tips and advice

• The textures created by this add-on can be directly used in DECALmachine.

• I recommend baking with 100% Compression. This slows down the baking, but it means much smaller file sizes.

• The origin point (0x, 0y, 0z) is always used as the center for the textures.

  The Size option specifies how big your scene is, anything outside of Size won't be baked.

  By default it bakes a 2m x 2m box centered on the origin.

• If you want the texture files to have a prefix you can simply add it to the Output folder:

  

• You can have multiple different scenes in the same .blend file, and each scene can have different options (output folder, textures, size, etc.)

• It will only bake renderable objects, so if you don't want to bake an object you can disable rendering:

  

• If you use a Principled BSDF node it will be baked into the textures:

  

  These sockets are supported: Base Color, Metallic, Roughness, Emission, Alpha, and Normal.

  It works with both simple values and also complex procedural node trees.

• If you are baking hair, you should set the Hair Shape Type setting to Strip:

  

  You should also create your hairs with the highest quality possible. Because they are being baked to a texture, the performance doesn't matter.

Texture Information

• Render bakes a texture which is the same as Render Image (F12). This is useful for creating HDRIs, skyboxes, or billboards.

• Alpha bakes a black-and-white alpha / opacity / transparency texture.

  This is affected by changing the Alpha socket of the Principled BSDF node, and it is also affected by the Blend Mode settings (Opaque, Alpha Clip, Alpha Hashed, and Alpha Blend).

• AO bakes an ambient occlusion texture. White means no occlusion, and black means full occlusion.

  Ambient occlusion means how close an object is to another object. It is used to add in fake shadows.

• Curvature bakes a curvature map. Gray means no curvature, white means curving outwards (convex), and black means curving inwards (concave).

  This is often used to add extra detail to the edges of models (scratches, scuffs, or dirt).

  The Contrast setting controls how strong the black / white colors are.

• Normal bakes a normal map. This is affected by the Normal socket of the Principled BSDF node.

• Height bakes a height map. Gray means the geometry is at the center 0z, white means positive +z, and black means negative -z.

  This can be used to create parallax effects to add extra depth, or to create bump maps.

  By default it calculates the max bounds automatically based on the vertexes in your scene. But you can instead choose Manual mode and then manually change the max bounds.

• Depth bakes a depth map. Black means right in front of the camera, white means far away from the camera.

  By default it calculates the max distance automatically based on the vertexes in your scene. But you can instead choose Manual mode and then manually change the max distance.

• Color bakes the Base Color socket of the Principled BSDF node.

• Emission bakes the Emission socket of the Principled BSDF node.

• Metallic bakes the Metallic socket of the Principled BSDF node.

• Roughness bakes the Roughness socket of the Principled BSDF node.

• Object Random bakes a black-and-white texture where every object is given a random grayscale color.

  This can be used for post-processing to mask out specific objects.

• Object Index bakes a black-and-white texture which is based on the object's Pass Index:

  

  This can be used to mask out specific objects, or groups of objects.

  You must change the Max option to be the same as the biggest Pass Index that you are using.

• Material Index bakes a black-and-white texture which is based on the material's Pass Index:

  

  This can be used to mask out specific materials, or groups of materials. This is particularly useful for DECALmachine's Subset map.

  You must change the Max option to be the same as the biggest Pass Index that you are using.

• Hair Random bakes a black-and-white texture where every particle hair strand is given a random grayscale color.

• Hair Root bakes a black-and-white texture where black is the root of the hair, and white is the tip of the hair.

For programmers

If you want to modify this add-on, follow these steps:

1. git clone https://github.com/Pauan/blender-bake-scene.git

2. cd blender-bake-scene

3. blender --background --python install.py

   This will install the add-on locally.

4. Now you can open Blender normally and the add-on will be installed.

5. When you make changes to the code, close Blender and then run blender --background --python install.py again.