Changelog / Updates

Sanctus Bake v1.1.6 - May 30, 2026

This update introduces major technical overhauls to the baking core backend, shifting from standard data tracking to a highly optimized, production-ready pipeline for modern game engines and high-end shading workflows.

NEW FEATURES

1. Hybrid Lighting Pass (Direct / Indirect Light Baking)

You can now choose to bake real scene illumination directly into your Base Color maps. By using a non-destructive temporary material override pass coupled with a precise Lambertian scattering math correction 1/π, the engine extracts absolute lighting data. Your color textures will seamlessly inherit direct shadows, indirect light bounces, and light hues in 32-bit float HDR precision.

2. Optional Additive Decal Normal Blending

Sanctus Library Decals will no longer flatten the underlying surface structures. The baking engine now performs a normalized vector addition in tangent space. This allows decals to realistically warp and absorb the grain, cracks, or micro-bumps of the target object mesh underneath.

3. Native Ambient Occlusion (AO) Baking Channel

A new dedicated Ambient Occlusion map type has been added to the baking queue. Instead of clunky node tree modifications, it calls Cycles' native ray-tracing AO engine directly. Because it operates as an independent map channel, you can configure its render samples individually to eliminate noise in deep crevices without slowing down the rest of your texture passes.

4. Automated 16-Bit Color Depth Allocation

To protect your surface quality, the export engine now features automated bitrate switching. When saving your texture sets to disk, the addon automatically detects Normal and Displacement maps and locks them to 16-bit depth to completely eliminate gradient pixel banding. Other maps are kept at 8-bit to ensure your file sizes stay perfectly optimized.

5. Channel Packager Engine (ORM Textures)

Optimized for game developers and pipeline environments (Unreal Engine, Unity, Godot). You can now toggle the Pack ORM option to automatically merge three grayscale maps into a single RGB texture file: Red (Ambient Occlusion), Green (Roughness), and Blue (Metallic). If your queue is missing any of these channels, the backend automatically injects industry-standard PBR fallback constants so the texture never breaks.

6. Automated Curvature / Cavity Mask Utility

A utility channel designed specifically for technical artists and stylized asset creators. This feature runs a non-destructive background routine that calculates Blender's native geometric mesh limits to cleanly separate sharp crevices from exposed peaks. The system automates topology reading and exports a standalone, pristine 8-bit grayscale texture mask. It is perfect for driving complex procedural edge-wear shaders, dirt accumulations, or hand-painted map accents without leaving an unorganized footprint in your project file.

7. "Auto-Populate from Material" Smart Ingestion

Baking setup is now completely automated. With a single click, the new Auto-Populate engine runs a back-tracing routine starting directly from your material's final output node. If the queue detects existing maps, it will safely prompt you to either overwrite or append channels. The system seamlessly parses the active shader networks and instantly maps out your baking channels, ensuring an ultra-fast setup whether you are working with complex custom creations or expanding existing scenes.

8. Universal PBR & Principled BSDF Material Ingest

The baking suite now natively understands industry-standard shader layouts. When running the Auto-Populate command, the backend deeply analyzes the connections on your Principled BSDF node. It intelligently detects whether your normal maps are raw procedural displacement vectors or pre-converted tangent space textures, extracting the correct source data automatically. Furthermore, it traces independent displacement/height networks from the material output, instancing baked results with a standardized 1.0 Scale and 0.5 Midlevel baseline to guarantee flawless, non-destructive export compatibility with modern game engines like Unreal Engine and Unity.

9. Automated Viewport Safety Throttling

To guarantee maximum system stability and eliminate interface lag during intensive compute operations, the baking pipeline now incorporates an automated viewport state manager. Upon initializing a bake, the addon captures your current shading environment and instantly throttles the viewport into Solid View. This effectively pauses heavy real-time material evaluations on the GPU, dedicating 100% of your system's hardware resources straight to the baking engine. Once the queue is fully processed, your original viewport shading state is restored, keeping your interactive workspace fluid, responsive, and completely crash-proof.