Additional maps to bake in cycles
Request mostly from game artists who use cycles for texture making.
We really need to have the ability to render specular roughness (in cycles there is no option to render roughness, only in/direct and colour) + cycles bakes colour of gloss with taking fresnel in account which is incorrect, fresnel should go apart with gloss.
Also, it is impossible to render custom normals made with noises and combined with existing normal maps. It is possible to render normal maps only when bump map is connected to displacement, which is not convenient for combine normal maps.
And one more request for baking: Fresnel power baker. Sometimes we need custom fresnels but blender can not bake information about it (I am talking about single texture which describes power and variety of fresnel when we put something in "blend" input of Layer weight node)
4 Comments
Baking option for the roughness map should should be a must, as well for the metalness map. Doing some hacks with the Emission shader in the node editor is not an option, if you have dozens of materials/objects to bake.
I don't know why baking is still so neglected in Blender, when it's the most important feature when you don't want to use another commercial programs like Substance Painter.
I guess this is a target for 2.8 and eevee, right ?
You can bake any combination of any map or maps you like (like fresnel intensity, or roughness) by plugging the color you want to an Emission shader and baking the "Emit" in the Bake options. Another thing that helped me was to set the color space of the target texture in the UV window (N panel) to "Raw" to properly export the textures for roughness, specular, or normalmap to other game engines.
However, it would be nice to have a way to bake the combined normal maps as well. Currently, if you want to bake any mixture after using one or several Normal map nodes, you get a world space normal, instead of tangent. And then you have to use blender internal or xNormal to convert it to tangent space.
Emit node - is not the way out! (Alas) Especially when you get so complex node structures. E.g. my fresh complex node structure
Also - normal maps have to be converted properly even to OS or WorldSpace, XNormal will never work correctly with slight incorrect OS normal map (tested this pain long time ago, get working but ugly result) And again - we could not just plug in normal map input to emission in complex node structures, just because there is some things, like node groups with their own bump mapping setup.
We really, really need this update. I planned to make my future game assets in cycles, but while testing yesterday, found that it will be near impossible, or really painful with really hard setup and concentration to the correct node structure not on content that I am making.