Bake

Bake is a texture baker built on Copernicus. It takes the detail of high-poly geometry and writes it as texture maps on a low-poly mesh's UVs, so the geometry can stay light. It is used in the scan workflows: baking a scanned trunk onto its graft mesh, and making tiling textures from a scanned section. Baking covers the method, and Baking for Scans the workflows.

The Bake tool is on the Natsura toolbar under Scans.

Inputs

The inputs are labelled Proxy, Bake Target and Bake Source (Optional). The first, Proxy, is the low-poly mesh that receives the maps, and the second, Bake Target, is the detail baked onto it.

To bake a scanned trunk, wire the first two outputs of Create Graft Mesh into the first two inputs. For tiling textures, see Baking for Scans.

Bake Group (under Advanced, * ^unbake by default) sets which parts of the first input are baked.

Output

Bake All writes colour, height and normal maps to Directory ($HIP/Natsura by default), named from Name and each channel's suffix, such as <Name>_colour.tiff. Format can be tiff, tga, png or jpeg, and Resolution is 1024 by 1024 by default. Reload Textures refreshes the textures shown in the viewport after a bake. Baking covers resolution, the ray settings and Extrapolate Boundaries.

Make it Tile turns the bake into a tiling texture, for the tube and patch workflow. Tiling Mode sets the direction (Tile V, Tile U, Tile Cross or Tile Diamond), and Tiling Mask Preview shows the mask used for the tiling.

Double-click the Bake node to edit the maps in Copernicus before they are written. See Copernicus.

Status

More channels are planned.