High > Low Baking Tutorial   /   Raycast Displacement Tutorial

Why do you need this addon? 

Baking in vanilla Blender is painful—but no more. Bakery is the complete baking solution for both VFX and game workflows, combining accuracy, automation and flexibility in one streamlined tool. Bake high-to-low assets and solo objects together in the same job, with full UDIM support, automatic pairing, cages, ray-distance detection, supersampling and production-ready output controls. Generate accurate raycast displacement, normal maps, AO, thickness, curvature using three different methods, vertex colours, Object IDs, world-space normals and position, PBR material channels, custom shader node outputs and AOVs. You can also transfer textures between UV sets, pack channels, run a preflight check and automatically build a finished baked material—giving you everything needed to bake complex assets quickly, reliably and without Blender’s usual setup headaches. 

Features:

Organize Selected:

• Takes a selection of low/high poly objects and organizes them into their corresponding high/low collections based on bounding box size and poly count.
• Sub mesh objects such as mesh decals are supported. Just parent your sub mesh objects/decals to its highres and it will be treated as a combined object at bake time. 
  
  

Pairing:

• Set the low/high collections for baking.
• Choose how baking pairs objects together. Options include: By Name/By Order/Combined
  
  

Subdivisions:

• Set the subdivisons of your high and lowres mesh (if needed). 
• Set the UV and boundary smoothing options if you are subdividing your low poly.
  
  

Cages:

• Displacement Cage:
  -Displacement Cage has a built in auto detect system that scans the low and high to find the best approximation of how large the scan distance needs to be. This is combined with a buffer to multiply  the size of the scan distance to help with projection errors. If the user needs custom control over the size of the cage they can select any 'lowres' object and create a manual override per object for full control.
• Cycles Cage:
  -Auto Cage scans the low/high objects for find the optimal cage size with the inclusion of a buffer. Users can control the min inflation to ensure all cage have a minimum inflation. Just like the displacement cage system, users can select any 'lowres' object and create a manual override cage mesh on a per object basis for when the auto cage results need fine tuning. This will duplicate the lowres mesh, rename it, and place it in its own collection for the user to manually alter the cage. Users can also preview all cage objects to quickly visualize any parts of the hires that are not fully encapsulated within the cage.
  -Manual Cage simply duplicates all the lowres objects and places them inside their own collection allowing the user to manually edit the cages individually for full control. 
  
  

Bake Passes (All bake preview modes will isolate all highres/solo lowres objects, and enter rendered mode for quick visualization)

• Displacement
  -Unlike blenders default displacement baker, this uses raycasting which is much more accurate than blenders multiresolution baker. This is the ONLY baker capable of raycasted displacement. Watch THIS VIDEO for more detail on raycast displacement.
  -Borders to Nearest: Users can enable this option to ensure you do not get spikes around border edges of your mesh when baking displacement. You also have the ability to increase the mask size of the border by increasing the 'Expand' setting.
  -After baking, hit preview to automatically apply subdivision and displacement modifiers to quickly preview the result.
  
  
  
• Normal
  Bakes out both geometry+shader normals combined using cycles standard normal baking system.
  
  
• World Space Normal
  Bake World Space Normals (For adding dust to the tops of surfaces for example)
  
  
• World Position
  Bake a normalized gradient spanning across the X / Y / Z Axis.
  
• Object ID
  Assign a random color to all mesh islands
  
  
• Custom Output
  This pass allows users to select any node in the shader tree and add it as a bake point. You can add as many bake points as you like and bake them out all at once. (Great if you have utility/RGB masks for example that would be time consuming to bake out one at a time). You can also  detect and bake out any shader AOVs.
  
  
• Ambient Occlusion
  This pass allows you to bake out anything relating to AO. Settings include samples/distance/inside/local/blur. Toggle on inside to generate thickness maps. 
  
• Thickness
  Bake out mesh thickness.
  
  
• Curvature
  Users have 4 Curvature options:
  - Pointiness
  - Custom bevel curvature (best for low poly models) 
  - Converting a pre baked normal map to a curvature map.
  - Signed Mesh Curvature (UCUPaints method) 
  
  
• Vertex Color
  Choose which vertex color layer you want to bake.
  
  
• PBR Channels
  This pass allows users to bake down a principal BRDF shader into its components. The list of passes will populate automatically based on what is plugged into the principal BRDF shaders on your high res / solo bake objects. You also have the ability to build a shader from your exported PBR channels to test out the results.
  
  

Transfer:

• Use this tab to transfer textures between UV Sets. Add as many textures you want to transfer by clicking '+' then batch transfer them all at once. This Mode is designed for solo objects only (in the lowres collection).
  
  

Output:

• Set your image name, output directory, resolution, margin, alpha method and if you want to store your baked images inside of blender as a datablock (saves you having to manually import after bake).
• Supersampling supported for perfect anti aliased edges. 
• For raycasted bakes such as normal/displacement, multi threading is supported to ensure fast bakes.
  
  

Full UI: