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Baking a Material

Video Tutorial: Baking System (Sanctus Bake 1.0) New version coming soon


Prerequisites

Before baking

  • The object must be UV unwrapped with no overlapping faces.
  • The Cycles render engine must be selected.
  • Open the SBake tab within the Shader Editor's N panel.

The fastest way to set up a bake. The engine automatically detects all map channels from your material.

  1. Select the object.
  2. In the SBake tab, click "Auto-Populate from Material".

  3. The queue will be populated with all detected maps (Base Color, Roughness, Metallic, Normal, Alpha, Displacement). If the queue already has maps, a confirmation prompt will appear.

    Multi-Slot Materials

    If your object has multiple material slots, Auto-Populate will detect maps from all slots and show them with slot numbers like [1], [2]. See the Multi-Slot Baking guide for details.

  4. Adjust the baking resolution, samples, and other settings according to your requirements. You can also enable additional features like Lighting, Mesh Maps, or ORM Packing in the settings section.

  5. Click the "Bake" button. The button will change to "Baking..." during the baking process.

    Note

    The baking time depends on the resolution, sample count, and complexity of the material.

  6. Once the baking process is complete, the textures will appear in the Texture Sets, ready for use. Click "Instantiate PBR setup" to create a quick node setup, prepared to replace the procedural material.

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  7. Connect the newly added Principled BSDF node to the Material Output node.

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Method 2: Manual Socket Selection

Use this method when you want to bake specific channels or need fine-grained control.

  1. Select the object.
  2. Right-click the Node Group of the material you intend to bake.

  3. Click "Select Sockets for Baking".

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  4. In the pop-up window, select the sockets you want to bake and click "OK".

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  5. The selected sockets will be added to the baking panel.

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  6. Adjust the baking resolution, samples, and other settings according to your requirements.

  7. Click the "Bake" button. The button will change to "Baking..." during the baking process.

    Note

    The baking time depends on the resolution, sample count, and complexity of the material.

  8. Once the baking process is complete, the textures will appear in the Texture Sets, ready for use. Click "Instantiate PBR setup" to create a quick node setup, prepared to replace the procedural material.

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  9. Connect the newly added Principled BSDF node to the Material Output node.

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