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  • Published 22 Jan 2019

Add Metallic, Base Color to texture bake types

I'm trying to bake a game asset for a PBR workflow, and created a high poly asset using a bunch of procedural materials. From my high poly, I want to bake out the following textures to my low poly mesh:

  • color
  • roughness
  • normal tangents
  • metallic

Currently, baking out metallic is not supported, so I have to work around it using another slot which is a little annoying but works fine. However, baking out the diffuse, will also bake out the parts that are metallic as black. Technically, this makes sense as that is what metalness does, but it doesn't quite fit with how most game engines today handle their PBR texture maps, with metal elements being bright on the albedo rather than black.

So a solution here would be:

  • add a baking option for 'METALLIC'
  • In the diffuse Bake Type, make 'COLOR' just bake down the base color without metal darkening. Maybe adding an option called 'ALBEDO' could be useful as the bake type that does get darkened in case you still want it to do this.

Getting these changes would help a lot in moving Blender forward for being a proper PBR texture creation tool. For a large majority of modern game assets, you need 5 maps: color, roughness, normals, metalness and AO. Making sure Blender can bake all these easily would be a big step in fleshing out PBR texture creation for Blender. Eevee supports all these maps already, we just need to be able to bake them!

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Development Status: Open

Upvote 33 Downvote 0
bram.eulaers
22 Jan 2019

5 Comments

ApeOnFire

Crazy that this still isn't implemented. Feels like it would be an easy fix and would make a big difference to everyone that's creating real-time assets.

1
pablo-dra

I completely agree with this and I really hope this need gets more exposure and gets implemented! Being able to bake with ease the main PBR maps (Albedo, Roughness, Metallic, and Normal) should be delivered natively. This is especially needed when working with very complex setups (either complex shader setups with nodegroups or with many objects to bake). I add an extra bit, which is that it would be great to have Anti-Aliased options when baking as well.

1
azagwen196

this would be very well appreciated, Right now I have to use weird workarounds to bake metalness.

1
cgvirus

Agreed

1
pablo-dra

6 years and counting... 2025... AI is dominating the world, and we still don't have a proper baker in Blender with metallic or to meet the standard needs...