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Baking a Material

Video Tutorial:


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.

Understanding UV Maps for Baking

If you're used to working with downloaded seamless PBR textures, you've probably set up UV maps that overlap or stack — that's fine for tiling textures because the pattern repeats and covers the whole surface regardless.

Baking is different. When you bake, every pixel of the 4K texture is a unique piece of your object's surface. If two faces share the same UV space, they'll fight for the same pixels and the result will be a garbled, overlapping mess.

Seamless Texture Workflow Baking Workflow
UVs can overlap? Yes — the texture tiles, so overlapping doesn't matter No — every face needs its own unique UV space
UV islands Can be stacked on top of each other Must be laid out separately, like puzzle pieces
Common use Floor tiles, brick walls, fabrics — anything that repeats Unique surfaces, decals, hero assets, anything that doesn't tile

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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