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I'm making a model for a game, and I'm aiming for a neat cel-shaded look. So, in Blender, I used the Toon BSDF on my model. Now, I want to convert the colors and shadows in the model (after applying the shader) to a flat texture .png file, since now I'm aiming for a static shadows look i.e. the shadows won't move from their positions if I change the light positions. Is there a way I can successfully do so, instead of painting the shadows manually in Photoshop?
Render engine: Cycles
Your object needs to be UV unwrapped. Maybe you already have a proper UV map, if not you can simply use a smart unwrap: in Edit Mode, select all faces with A, then hit U > UV Mapping > Smart UV Project. You can leave the settings on default, but it's best to set an Island Margin above 0, a small value like 0.01 or 0.02 is enough. You can enable the Scale to Bounds option, so that the UVs use more of the available space. Just be aware that the UVs might get stretched in this case.
Then go into the Shader Editor of your toon material. Add an Image Texture node (it doesn'T need to be connected to anything), click on the New button to create a new image. The Width and Height depend on how high you want the resolution to be. The color doesn't matter since you are going to bake the toon shader on this image texture.
With the Image Texture node selected (important!), go to the Render Properties- There under Bake make sure that Bake Type > Combined is selected. Then hit the Bake button.
After the bake is finished, you can go to the Image Editor or the UV EDitor to save the image. To use it on the object, just plugged the texture node directly in the Material Output node. This will work as if you had an Emission shader plugged in with the image as color. This way it will no longer change its shading depending on the scene lighting.
