Can't bake Cycles material to texture - "no active image in materials slot" or bake doesn't work?

Question

Ok, Ive looked everywhere for this and tried following solution explained here - Export cycles material to unity

in order to make my MATERIALS (I don't have textures - just basically diffuse materials that Id like to preserve in color/roughness/low poly look) when exporting to dae for use in Unity or Xcode.

If I try to bake without following the steps above I get error - "no active image in materials slot". But right now the bake turns black.

I followed everything mentioned and learned to preserve my material I need to bake them to textures - so I

1. created a new blank image in UV editor

2. unwrapped "U" my object to the image like here: (color doesn't come thru to image but I assume thats ok?

3. Set Bake settings like this:

4. Here is the material Im trying to get to stay put as its color/diffuse/etc once I export to dae:

And the results are all wrong. Textures are weirdly transparent and baking hasn't affected anything:

What am I doing wrong here? Ideally Im trying to go the easiest possible route keeping my MATERIALS going to Unity/xcode. How can I do this? Desperate here

Answer 1

Guessing a bit, but for this to work, you need to have an active (i.e. selected) Image texture node in the node editor. Did you remember to select it (make it active) before hitting Bake?

Also: I see you have selected multiple passes to bake. I think you need separate textures for each. (Select an image in the texture node, make sure it is still active, select a Bake type, hit Bake.)