RGB input on Image Node to Bake to texture
This is a small change with a huge outcome to improve the procedural nature of baking textures and shader data.
Add an input node to the image node in the shader editor which can be toggled on or off. This can turn an image node into a bake output.
'Emissive' should in theory work fine as a bake type, as this is how we individual bake out specific parts of the node tree.
Render settings will need to include a new option under Output/Target; 'Node Tree'. This option should default to using the 'Emissive' option as it's the logical choice for node tree baking.
With those few adjustments made to UI, the users has an intuitive method of batch baking.
Clicking 'bake' at this point should procedurally find every image where there is an input, make that image node active, baking from emissive output, then go onto the next valid image node within the selected objects until all have been found and baked to.
*Nice to have: *
-A checkbox to automatically save existing outputs.
This will dramatically improve Blender's baking workflow while still being 100% true to the Blender way of working.
-S
2 Comments
There a lot of changes planned for blender texturing / baking: blender devs blog
But that stuff gonna take months / years, if you need solution right now, I recommend using one of baking addons to simplify process. I personally use textools , it eliminates manual creation of textures and configuration of color spaces, removes need to select specific texture nodes for bake and adds ability to bake metallic textures which is missing.
If you don't like textools you can find bunch of other (both free and paid) baking addons on blender artists scripts subforum . But please don't suffer using default blender baking :)
Sure TextTools is also good for UV work :) You may guess from my love of nodes that BakeWrangler is my favourite baking plugin :D
Good to know the Blender team have some stuff in stall.
blendermarket.com/products/bake-wrangler
I love this solution but I don't love having to jump out of the shader panel while handling something that arguably should be linked up to the shading process.