Baking Attributes

Toolbar #

Many useful buttons live in the top bar of the Bake Project object properties. 

Setting	Description
Bake	Bakes all active outputs and writes them to disk.
New Group	Creates a new bake group. Bake groups are useful for isolating geometry groups from one another to prevent unwanted intersections.
Show/Hide High	Toggles visibility of high poly baker objects.
Show/Hide Low	Toggles visibility of low poly baker objects.
Preview Material	Previews bake outputs on low-poly geometry. Creates a preview material containing the normal map, AO, and material outputs, and applies it to low-poly meshes contained in the baker.

Geometry #

You can find various global mesh settings in the Geometry tab.

Setting	Header
Use Hidden Meshes	Meshes hidden in the outliner will be used for baking.
Ignore Transform	Mesh transforms, such as rotation and position, will be ignored for the purposes of baking.
Smooth Cage	Smooths low-poly mesh normals for the purposes of baking projection. This is generally helpful to avoid inconsistencies along UV seams.
Ignore Backfaces	Ignores the backsides of triangles on the high-poly mesh when baking. This is often useful for correctly baking crevices or floating geometry.
Fix Mirrored Tangents	Attempts to fix any issues arising from mirrored tangent spaces in low poly meshes.
Tangent Space	Selects a tangent space convention for all meshes. This is equivalent to changing the same setting on each low poly mesh in the bake project manually.
Tangent Calculation	Determines whether the mesh tangent space is computed at each vertex or each pixel. This is equivalent to manually changing the same setting on each low poly mesh in the bake project.
Tangent Orientation	Сonfigures the baker to output tangent space normal maps in either right or left-handed (Y-flipped) coordinate space. Right-handed tangents are often called Maya or OpenGL style, while left-handed are referred to as 3ds Max or Direct3D style.

Quick Loader #

The Quick Loader reads object names from your mesh file and automatically sets up Bake Groups using the following syntaxes:

• Filename_high
• Filename_low

Everything before high/low will be read as the object name. High/low determines whether the object will be sorted into the high or low poly slot, such as mymesh1_high and mymesh1_low. is a flag that can be used to sort many separate elements into one group. Everything after high/low will be treated as a variation. The names are not case-sensitive, so you can mix and match object_HIGH with object_low.

For example, Myobject1_high, Myobject1_high_bolt, and Myobject1_low will be added to a new bake group called Myobject1, while Myobject2_high, and Myobject2_low will be added to a bake group called Myobject2.

Output #

Set your Resolution, Path, and Maps in the Output tab.

Setting	Description
Output Path	Output path for bake results. This path will be used in both multi-file and multi-layer PSD outputs.
Samples	Samples per pixel. Higher numbers may yield better quality for some outputs but will greatly increase baking times.
Soften	Applies a softening filter to the baked surface. This can be useful for smoothing borders around floaters or other hard edges.
Format	Bit precision per color channel. Higher precision results in larger files, often with fewer banding artifacts.
Multi-Layer PSD	Writes all outputs into one layered Photoshop file instead of individual files for each map. This may generate large files and process more slowly.
Padding	Pads the resulting outputs to fill empty areas of the UV layout. This is useful for preventing filtering or mipmapping artifacts along UV borders.
Padding Size	Custom value of the padding size.

Texture Sets #

You can attach an existing or new Texture Project to the Baker, enabling you to load the baked maps into the Input Maps within the Texture Project.

Setting	Description
Multiple Texture Sets	Enable texture sets, a way of baking multiple maps based on unique materials applied to low polygon mesh(es).
Resolution	Set the width and height for all image outputs.
Texture Project Link	Allows linking baked maps to the existing Texture Project or a new one.

Maps #

Choose which maps you want to bake and save them as a preset for future use and load them from the Presets dropdown.

Setting	Description
Configure	Select maps that will be baked.
Presets	Save or load a preset of maps that will be baked.
Enable Map	Enable or disable the map for baking.
Settings	Edit the settings of this map.
Edit	Edits the baked map.
Preview	Preview the baked map on the low poly mesh in the viewport.