Blender build-in automatic texture baking and layers
My suggestion for Blender is having an automatic texture baking like in the substance painter with one click of the button without wasting time to setting texture images etc.
Second, layer painting on textures, at least basic functionality without the need to messing up with shaders.
4 Comments
Some suggestions:
Atm. Blender shader are organized by nodes not a layer system nor smart materials. So it is not direct comparable to other programs. But in most cases the (grouped) nodes finally lead into a specific parameter of a PBR material
An option wich might help in a first glance could be to give the user the options which parameter of a PBR material (Base Color, Normal, Emission, etc.) need to be baked. Not like as is with a drop down menu more like an option menu with checkboxes. So the user would get the baked results for every option choosen.
I can also imagine to flag/set nodes directly to be baked. This way Blender knows during the bake process which nodes have to be considered.
The devs generate a new node wich you can set anywhere into your node nudles to set that state as a baking point.
As other suggested Blender needs a Layer System and Smart Materials. So if some kind of these gets implemented some day I geuss it would be possible to make the baking more user friendly.
This would be great but proposals work best here when they're more than just requests. This is too vague to be actionable. How would this work within Blender's current interface and usage paradigms? It can't work the same way as Substance since Blender is a different software with different usage methods. So for this to be acted on by devs it needs a little more thought.
If you really want this to lift off it would help a lot to present an option for how this could work in Blender. In the meantime there are some good addons for automated baking. TexTools is a robust free option I can recommend.
Ok, so how is that possible that people outside the Blender Foundation are able to create extensions that work more or less the way I described, but the Blender Foundation cannot create anything even remotely similar to that?
Listing those extensions might help give context to how features like these could be implemented, for starters. The goal should be to answer as many questions for the developers as possible. The ultimate version of this is writing the code and implementing it yourself, but presenting a basic plan is still very useful and gets the ball rolling.
I would like to see a better plan here so it receives more upvotes because I believe many people want what you're asking for. Blender may be a well-organized open-source software, but it's still an open-source software with most features designed and provided by the community. Asking for things like this is Unity Technologies or Bethesda will not make the core devs magically prioritize them.