Blender Cycles Texture Baking Tutorial

Blender tutorial, in which I teach you how to create textures in cycles, through the technique known as material baking. Yes, if you bake the diffuse color of a material, you can create an image texture file. It is an interesting technique which allows you to create an image file from your cycles materials and use them in the blender internal engine and even in other softwares.

Well well, hello there.

This is Metapixelatron.

Today, I will teach you how to convert your materials, made with nodes in cycles, into texture images.

So, let's begin.

I assume you have an object.

With this object selected, go to edit mode.

Now, we must create a UV layout for this object.

As always, the first thing we need to do is select all the edges which will be converted into UV layout seams.

After the edges are all selected, click mark seam.

The seams will be marked as red lines.

Now, select all the faces of the object, and then unwrap the UV layout.

Inside the image editor, you will be able to see the UV layout.

You can also make some slight modifications to the UV layout.

Once this is done, you have to create a new image, which will be used in the baking process of the texture.

The quality of the image depends, mostly, on the resolution.

For this tutorial, I will use 512 pixels by 512 pixels.

I am not concerned with the quality of the final texture, since this is only a tutorial.

Ok, a black image is created.

Now, we need to set up the material nodes, so they will bake the materials to the image.

It is a really simple process.

All you need to do, is add a single node.

Yes, you need to add the image texture node, and then select your new image as the input.

Now, do the same thing for the other materials of the object.

Go through all your materials, and make sure that the image texture node is selected on all of them.

Then, go to the image editor and select your image.

Now, go to the render options.

Make sure your rendering settings are optimized, because the baking process may take a while.

Open the bake tab.

The type of pass for this bake process, will be the diffuse color.

Leave the margin at 16 pixels.

If you are using a higher resolution image, you may want to increase the margin.

Now, click the bake button.

The baking process will take a certain amount of time.

It will seem as if the progress bar is stopped, but it is working.

Could take more than 8 hours, for resolutions higher than 2048 pixels, depending on your computer.

Once it is finished, the image will appear.

It may seem brighter than expected, but it will look normal once you save it as an image file.

So, save this image as an image file.

Select a directory for it, and name the image output.

As you can see, the image doesn't look that bright anymore, and it is possible to see the details.

Now, you can remove the old materials from the object.

They are no longer needed, as you have an image file, which contains the color informations of those materials in a single input.

You can create a new material for the image, but you can also use one of the old materials.

Just replace the old material nodes with the image texture node, and load the image file as the input of this image texture node.

Now, connect it to the diffuse node.

The final result is a texture, containing all the color information of the old materials.

Again, this is a very low quality texture.

If you really want a detailed texture, use a higher resolution image file.

Also, if you are using an object which contains the mirror modifier, make sure to remove the modifier before baking the texture.

I hope this was helpful.

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