Blender quits/crashes during Emission Bake for pore texture (Realistic Character Course)

Hi everyone,

I’m following a CG course for creating a realistic human character. Everything was going fine, but I’m stuck at the emission baking step used for baking pore details onto the face.

The instructor’s settings and my settings are exactly the same, but whenever I click Bake, Blender runs for a while and then completely quits/crashes without showing any error message.

What I’m doing:

Baking Emission Map for face pores

Following the exact node setup from the course

Texture size: 4K

Margin: 10px

Cycles → GPU Compute

What I’ve tried:

Restarted Blender

Reduced bake resolution (same issue)

Disabled addons

Tried CPU bake and GPU bake

Tried a fresh .blend file and appended objects

Increased undo steps + memory settings

Issue:

Blender closes suddenly in the middle of the baking

process with no crash report.

My System Specs:

Processor: Intel Core i9-14900KS

Motherboard: Gigabyte Z790 UD AC

GPU: Gigabyte RTX 5070 Windforce 12GB GDDR7

RAM: Corsair Vengeance 64GB (32×2) DDR5 5200MHz

Storage: NVMe SSD

OS: Windows 11

What I need help with:

Why is Blender crashing during emission bake?

Is it a GPU/VRAM memory spike issue?

Any recommended bake settings for high-detail pore maps?

How can I check proper crash logs?

Thanks in advance for any help!