About The Baker #
Toolbag utilizes the power of your GPU (video card) to create super fast bakes. Toolbag’s baking tools are not only fast, they’re smart, too! Adjusting local areas of your mesh will rebake only the affected area, resulting in a near-instantaneous update to the previewed result. The baker has been designed with artists in mind, and tools like bake groups, offset and skew painting, and real-time preview combine to create an exceptionally intuitive and efficient baking workflow.
Toolbag’s powerful GPU rendering engine can handle very high-resolution meshes well into the millions of polygons when used with modern video cards. Toolbag has no polygon limit; however, performance depends on the specific GPU that you’re using.
To get started, check out our Intro to Baking video tutorial, then read on through our baking category of docs right here for more.
What is Baking? #
Generally speaking, baking involves projecting content from a high-resolution (source) mesh to a low-resolution (destination) mesh, but it can also mean transferring content from one mesh to another with different topology or UVs. To bake, you’ll need to ensure your destination mesh has UVs. However, UVs are not required for the source mesh unless it has materials with texture maps that will contribute to the bake.
Baking is commonly used to capture detailed surfaces from objects that are otherwise too dense or resource-heavy to be used directly in games, film, or other types of visual media.

What Can Toolbag Bake? #
Toolbag can bake common image map types such as Normal, Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, Height, and more. Check out the Map Types section to see the full list of supported maps and learn more about each output.

How Does Projection Work? #
To bake texture maps, the geometry from the high poly source mesh is projected (ray traced) onto the low poly mesh. The best way to visualize this is to imagine a camera looking at the high poly and capturing the direction of the surface for every pixel in the normal map. To ensure the projection does not hit the wrong elements, a cage or projection mesh must be set up to limit the distance of the projection. For each pixel, the camera angle is set by the normal direction of the cage.
Adding a Baking Project #
To begin baking, add a Bake Project to your Scene hierarchy. There are two ways to do so:
1. Main Menu > Scene > Add Object > Bake Project

2. Scene Window > New Baking Project Icon
