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I am having many issues with the texture baking feature. I am trying to bake textures in blender so I can use them in the unity game engine. The main problems i'm having are: when trying to bake the diffuse (main color) map it just bakes into a plain dark solid colour, and the other problem is that baking the normal map results in a terrible looking, pixelated version of the original normal map and it doesnt create a realistic look to the texture. I have tried changing the size of the blades UV map to a larger size, however this did nothing.

Original normal map and colors:enter image description here

Baked Normal map:enter image description here

UV preview:enter image description here

with baked Diffuse map (preview on mesh):enter image description here

UV preview:enter image description here For some reason all color is lost on the diffuse and the normal map lacks any qaulity, despite baking the textures at 2048px by 2048px. Although for some reason (dont know if it's a coincidence)the roughness map bakes perfectly. If anyone knows how to fix this, or can suggest another way of doing this, that'd be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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  • $\begingroup$ How do you bake it? Which nodes do you use? The baked image can be black when the Principled BSDF has a value greater 0 for Subsurf Scattering or Metallic. Or when there is no light. $\endgroup$
    – Blunder
    Oct 22, 2021 at 23:59

1 Answer 1

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To bake pure diffuse colors (albedo) you have to choose "Diffuse" bake type, and uncheck the "Direct" and "indirect" light influence, leaving "color" only. During diffuse bake turn down to 0 Metallic value, as stated by Blunder in the comment above.

For proper Normal baking it's very important that both the new texture node you're baking on and the texture node you're reading from have their color space setted as "Non-color" instead of sRGB (roughness, metallic, and any other B/W texture should use Non-color as well).

Note that, according to the workflow you used to create textures and nodes, it can happen that when you change a color space on one node some others nodes can get the change: always check the correct nodes color space.

Note also that Normal map colors are very sensitive, so it's a good choice to have a normal map as big as possible, and save it in 16 bit depth format.

Note also that, as light isn't involved in baking process, I reduced the samples count to 1, to speed up the baking process.

In your case another problem arises: as normal values are generated by a checker node, its values (0.8 and 0.2) have no soft transitions, so once they get baked no anti-aliasing is generated, creating bad artifacts.

I tried to solve the problem by temporarily connecting the checker node's output to roughness input and baking this "roughness" values in non color data on a 8K 16 bit EXR texture, added some blur in Photoshop, and used this image as input of the Bump map in your original material (this procedure is something like adding a "Bevel" between the checker quads).

The result isn't perfect, but maybe it has enough quality for your goals.

enter image description here

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  • $\begingroup$ Thanks for the reponse! however It just seems to end up with the same result, for both the diffuse and normal map. The diffuse is still baking out black and the normal map still looks extremely low res and is almost unoticable(despite baking them at 2048px x 2048px). Would you like me to send my node layout to see if it is actually compatible with cycles? If needed I can share the project file so you can review my UV maps. Perhaps it is because the shape is to complex. $\endgroup$
    – CGI-Demon402
    Oct 23, 2021 at 9:45
  • $\begingroup$ You can upload the file (with embedded textures) and share the link here: blend-exchange.com $\endgroup$
    – josh sanfelici
    Oct 23, 2021 at 9:50
  • $\begingroup$ This should be the correct file with materials applied. <img src="https://blend-exchange.com/embedImage.png?bid=rgb8lqZS" /> $\endgroup$
    – CGI-Demon402
    Oct 23, 2021 at 9:57
  • $\begingroup$ I updated my answer. $\endgroup$
    – josh sanfelici
    Oct 23, 2021 at 11:10
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks again! this is very helpful, could you share your edited version of the blade(blend-exchange.com). This is because I do not have access to your photoshop edited normal map. A final question, if you share this blend file (with your edited photoshop edit included if possible) will i be able to use this normal map again, if im not thinking of changing the normal aspect of these blade textures? $\endgroup$
    – CGI-Demon402
    Oct 23, 2021 at 11:46

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