Baking

Bake is Natsura's texture baker, built on Copernicus. It takes the detail of a high-poly mesh (a scanned trunk, a sculpt) and writes it as texture maps on the UVs of a lighter mesh, so the detail stays and the polygons go.

The same baker makes the tiling textures for the scan workflow, and it accepts meshes that aren't scans. For a scanned trunk, wire the first two outputs of Create Graft Mesh into Bake's first two inputs (Proxy and Bake Target). For tiling textures and the rest of the scan workflow, see Baking for Scans.

What it writes

Bake writes three maps:

• Colour, from the source textures.
• Height.
• Normal, in MikkT tangent space so it reads correctly in engines such as Unreal.

Bake All writes the maps to Directory, named from Name plus each channel's suffix (_colour, _height, _normal), as TIFF by default. Resolution is 1024 by default and works up to 8k before memory becomes the limit. Supersampling raises the quality at the cost of bake time.

How it bakes

Bake casts rays between the two meshes to find the detail. Ray Dist sets how far the rays reach, Ray Start Offset where they start, and Ray Direction which way they go. Seams between UV islands are fixed automatically.

Under Bake Processes, leave Extrapolate Boundaries on, which spreads colour past the edges of each UV island so seams don't show. Make it Tile is for building tiling textures (see Baking for Scans).

Editing the maps

Double-click the Bake node to go into its Copernicus network and change the baked maps before they are written: grade the colour, adjust the normals, and so on. See Copernicus.

If a bake looks wrong

• Blank or partial: the rays aren't reaching the source. Increase Ray Dist, or change Ray Direction.

Related

• Baking for Scans, the bake in the scan workflow.
• Surface Materials, where baked maps end up.