Using Blender Like Substance Designer

Sometimes baking to an image texture will let us down if we have some alpha transparency involved, so instead here’s a Substance Designer styled approach to getting our needed bakes out of Blender 2.8 instead…

In this Blender tutorial we’ll…

Show how to bake to a plane
Setup camera and materials to render like a bake
Show a potential bug in the current Eevee renders
Convert the bump node output to a normal map using nodes
Save out the texture passes
Show the renders working in Eevee and in Unreal Engine 4

Chapter List

00:00 – Overview
02:51 – Reason To Layer
05:11 – Baking To A Plane
05:24 – Baking 1 – Create the plane to bake to
05:32 – Baking 2 – Create the texture to bake to
06:30 – Baking 3 – Choose bake pass type
06:46 – Baking 4 – Select the geometry you want to bake to the plane
05:09 – Baking 5 – Hit Bake – or see 6 to optimize
07:00 – Baking 6 – Optimize
07:14 – Limitations Of Baking
08:04 – Setting Up The Camera
09:30 – Setting Up The Materials
10:22 – Frames and reroute nodes
12:15 – Continuing with the materials
13:54 – Rendering Final Setup
14:53 – Eevee rendering border issue (world material bleed)
16:33 – Continuing with rendering final setup
17:50 – Bump To Normal Map
20:08 – Saving The Textures
22:27 – Using The Textures on a single plane
24:58 – Using The Textures In UE4
27:23 – END

BAKE DOWNSIDE – Notice (above right) the loss of detail

BAKE UPSIDE – Notice above the speed at which the shader updates on the first plane. Simply put we get faster changes and faster renders. Meanwhile the 2nd plane that isn’t baked and still has huge amounts of node calculations takes close to 20 seconds to make the same change.