Bake all principled maps
Now when we have the principled shader, I think it would be also possible to just have one button that just bakes all the channels that are being used from principled shader to image textures.
Textool addon renderhjs.net/textools/blender/ is a good start. It works in a way that I only need to press the "bake" button, located in UV-image editor and the add-on will create a texture and all settings automatically. No need to waste time clicking around. I love using it since it is much faster and better way of baking than the old way, but currently, it does not support the principled shader.
How I think this would work: Similar way as textools, or maybe completely replace old baking system with textools? I select "principled" from the texture templates and click "bake" button. Blender will check the settings under the hood in a similar way as textools is normally checking them. Then it checks which principled channels are being used in your shader and checks corresponding checkboxes in the baking tab settings. Now it renders an image file from all the principled channels to the UV-image editor and you can save them.
You should be able to disable or activate channels by using checkboxes if you wanna later edit and bake only single one of the textures.
9 Comments
You can test my addon for bake PBR maps!! Now is a beta, but work...
blender.community/c/hoy/C9bbbc/
Absolutely agree!!
Great Great Great!!!
but what if you cobine two principled shaders by a mixing node + mask , how do you bake then ?
@dodododorian: That is a good question. I think it is possible to make any shader we want to with just only one principled shader node, but that would need to make a quite complex node tree and masking etc. But probably we would need to bake the mask also and then later use it for the textures and if we wanna combine those textures to be only one texture, then we would need to bake it again. Not sure can this be done automatically?
@dodododorian: A good solution, in my opinion, would be to add an "output" node like the one that already exists in the compositor, so it would be up to you to decide which nodes do you want to bake. And with the benefit of being able to decide the output format and name for each one. It would also prevent the accidental overwriting of preexistent maps(maybe even used in the node tree)
@juantxogargallo: "Baking node" actually sounds a really good idea. That could be one new proposal and I believe it could fix most of our baking problems.
@dodododorian: Do not combine shaders, combine maps.
@shubol: much more complex if you want ro paint pbr