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.

Links & Project Files

Download Blender 2.8

Procedural Clean Asphalt Texturing in Eevee Tutorial

Updated asphalt blend file with packed textures and single plane setup

Google Summer Of Code Procedural Texturing Project

Substance Designer

Great Blender Procedural Examples and Giveaways by Simon Thommes

Let’s carry it on in the comments below if you think we should go into further details on anything!

The post Using Blender Like Substance Designer appeared first on Creative Shrimp.

What is Texture Baking?

Essentially, we take everything – direct lighting, reflection, diffuse color, indirect illumination, ambient occlusion – and try to pack it into 1 texture.

Why Texture Baking?

1. Creative reasons

Imagine you have achieved some spectacular shader in Blender scene, that involve multiple texture layers, wicked mix using grunge map and so on. Now you want to transport it directly to Unity, while retaining the look.

Exporting just the diffuse texture won’t to the justice to this uber material of yours, because Unity shader system differs from what Blender has.

What we can do is to bake everything in 1 texture (all shadows, multiple layers of awesomeness, etc). Then it will be easier to replicate the look in Unity, by inserting this texture in some shader. Yep?

2. Performance

As we will have just one texture, in some cases we wouldn’t even need to calculate the lighting at all in the game engine. In our example, we have a grungy room with a window.

Surely, it demands some Global Illumination solution. Real-time Global Illumination is very heavy performance-wise. So we can just bake lighting (and every other texture) to one package.

3. Convenience

Sometimes, it’s just more convenient to have one texture. As a bonus, it takes less space on hard drive.

Baking Passes in Blender

Here you can see how various passes (Diffuse, Lighting, etc) sums up to produce the Complete map.

As a variant, we can just bake the Diffuse texture and leave light baking to Unity. Honestly, I would advice to do all lighting stuff in Unity, because it has very fast lightmapper. But it demands the Pro version, so plan accordingly.

And while I was writing the previous sentence, I realized one possible benefit of baking light in Blender – it cost you no money.

Bake Lighting in Blender and Unity: Some Differences

What are the differences between these baking options?

1. Blender can bake various passes, including Complete map. Unity bakes only lighting, but does it gracefully.

2. Unity lightmapper is, obviously, fully integrated into Unity engine. So you won’t need to export textures back and forth.

Just press button, wait for it to calculate, done.

Baking equals Faking?

To some degree – yeah. But don’t worry, because faking is fine. And very effective on mobiles, where we can’t afford to calculate expensive effects in real-time.

Game Level Texturing Introduction

1. Block out the model & Optimize it
2. Unwrap everything into 1 UV map
3. Paint and project the texture
4. Clone details from 2-nd UV map
5. Bake it
6. Enjoy the result and start making games (this is optional)

The post Game level texturing: Bake lighting in Blender and Unity (PART 5/5) appeared first on Creative Shrimp.