How do you bake out a world space/position normal maps?

Question

Cycles doesn't seem to allow me to bake it's World-Space Normals or Position Map. I just tried to bake it the same way I'd bake a Normal Map but with their own Material and Image. Then some setting switched around.

That'd be cycles render, bake type diffuse, only color on the Influence, and selected as active is false. New Mat with the Texture Coordinate plugged into a Vector Transform and then just a Material Output.

I need image data of the world space normals and the position map so I can use the tri-planar node in substance to get a seamless sphere material.

But I can't figure out how to bake out my maps. And the bake is "successful" but the image data is just pure black. I know I got my material setup good because in the render mode it looks alright. Any help appreciated.

Answer 1

An object-space normal map, on an object without any rotation or parents, is also a world-space normal map. So you can just unparent, clear rotation, and bake an object space normal map if you want world-space normals.

When I want to output arbitrary data, I generally use emission. Run geometry/position into emission for world space position. Remember that position is in Blender units-- save to .exr (which supports floating point values) if it goes outside of 0,1 range, or remap.

If you want some other way to bake world space normals, consider remapping the channels of geometry/normal from -1,1 range to 0,1 range, then emitting and baking. Unless your application expects them in the -1,1 range, in which case, don't remap them, just remember to save as an .exr to support the negative numbers.

Whenever you're baking any values like this, remember that you want to bake to non-color data:

Answer 2

i've noticed that you could us a "Vector Math" block which does a MultiplyAdd. It requires less blocks.