allegorithmic Batchtool baking addon (not free :( )

Hi, I made addon for quick baking of textures.
I developed it for few reasons:

  • Substance Batchtools speed – you can bake 4k textures in minutes (compared to hours in blender)
  • Substance Batchtools reduced ram usage – I can bake hipoly meshes, without risk running out of ram
  • I wanted to have quick way to bake complex objects made with GroupPro addon. But you don’t have to use it. This addon works for baking normal objects too.
  • Easy iteration – no need to click Import/Export multiple times in blender, and your external baking app. This is usually tedious and time consuming process. All objects are exported automatically in background. Also addon is smart enough to know when object was changed, and export it only when needed.
  • Easy way to re-bake only parts of your texture, that were changed/updated. I will explain how to do this later below.

Gumroad
Info on my blog

Update 1.03

  • added ability to bake second or next uv set (UV map)
  • preview of frontal/rear ray distance
  • one click cage setup

More info on my blog

Example of fixing rear/frontal ray distance.

Once click cage setup, with ability to weight paint offset.

Bought, great time-saver with user-friendly UI. No more tries’n’pray baking style with compulsive export-import between blender and allegorithmic apps, because now I use the SDesigner’s baker directly in Blender interface. In a ‘indirect’ way I can forget the blender’s internal baker-render too, which require some tedious steps a noob like me wanna skip.

Oh and nice support by JoseConseco. So in the end: if you use Blender and you’v got Substance Designer (version 5.X is mandatory) this is a must buy imho.

This is looking incredibly useful. Can’t wait to try it - thank you Jose for your hard work.

I’m trying to bake with a group for a highpoly, and it’s not working.
Whenever I click bake it says ‘highpoly not found HI Group’ and additionally it turns off the baking on said mesh: https://gyazo.com/ee2dd0c6bfc6314e74a07d9626a5366d
The group exists, and I’ve already tested whether the layer it’s on just needs to be visible, but that has no effect either.

Regular baking works, so I’m afraid this addon is just bugged.

Mighty Pea - I have uploaded the fix with group 1.06. You should get email with notification. Thanks for the report. I usually do not use group option so it was unnoticed.

Gumroad is down for maintenance, but I’ll check it out later, thanks!

Same problem, and:
Despite the download saying 1.06, the addon is 1.05. Here’s a screenshot of the zip I got, and the script opened in notepad:

Yep, I forgot to change the version number but addon was fixed (I just tested the gumroad version and it worked). Did you press F8 to reload scripts? Also try restarting blender. If it won’t work can you send me the blend file?

I’ll send the blend file tomorrow, but here’s another thing I found:
When using Cycles, everytime you bake my material gets reset, and I have to click ‘use nodes’ again.

As you can see, the material keeps one existing, it’s just the ‘use nodes’ that gets turned off.

edit: group baking works now. Although resetting my plugins made my Pie Menu Editor keybind act up, so that’s not great.

Update 1.07

  • fixed flickering of forward ray distance icon
  • fixed material using nodes property being set to always to false after baking
  • added fill background option

This is a great addon. I purchased back in 1.03. I would love to see an option to save a bake profile. Edit: My work around is I create a default project and just import my objects into it. So it’s not really the end of the world. Thanks! :smiley:

emptygesture - good idea.

Update 1.08

  • baking presets
  • quick texture preview (in bledner internal for now) - preview textures (ao, normal, id) in blender internal glsl mode. Button is located in Helpers box (texture icon)

Example of one click material setup, and texture refreshing in Helper Box:

1 Like

Amazing! Thank you so much JoseConseco! :smiley:

I’m having a problem with the output images being solid colors, any tips?
blend file can be found here, it’s as simple as possible.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/1693140/baketest.blend

I just tested your file, I press bake and it work. Make sure your path to ‘sbsbaker.exe’ is set ok.
Info how to install:

Is there any info in blender console?

thank you for your quick reply, I didn’t expect one so quickly and I dug into it some more and found

Parsing Error: option ‘–output-size’ expected two vector components separated by comma, but only one (‘2’) was provided.

b’’
batchTool baking command=“C:\Program Files\Allegorithmic\Substance BatchTools 6\sbsbaker.exe” normal-from-mesh “c:\models extures/Exchange\c_low.fbx” --output-path “c:\models extures/Exchange” --output-name “c_low_normal” --dilation-width 0 --output-format png --apply-diffusion false --output-size 2 --highdef-mesh “c:\models extures/Exchange\c_high.fbx” --max-frontal 0.0200 --max-rear 0.0200 --relative-to-bbox true --ignore-backface true --average-normals true --antialiasing 0 --map-type 1 --normal-invert 0
Baking set c_low NORMAL time: 0:00:00.658440
cant load image c:\models extures/Exchange\c_low_normal.png.png
Saved: ‘c:\models extures\bake_normal.png’
Time: 00:00.00 (Saving: 00:00.00)

I’m not sure about the error loading a .png.png image but copied the command and made a batch file from it, without --output-size 4 in and that will bake using the fbxs in the exchange folder.

I just got latest blender 2.78c and latest substance baker 6.0.1 and sd_baker_1.09. I did however first try to install on blender 2.77 but have updated once I released it was incompatible.

(edited with more info)

I didn’t yet tried substance baker 6.0.1. I will install it and fix addon, asap (should be less that 1 hour).

Update 1.10

  • added suport for Substance Batchtools 6 series

I didn’t yet implemented 8k bakes. It just fixed baking bug FrankieH mentioned. No new features

Thanks Jose, it took a while to notice you added the setting to the plugin preferences, but it works now.

I’m having trouble baking curvature maps, it says

removing image c_low_normal.png
DAG zero… not allowed to happen!
Saved: ‘c:\models extures\bake_normal.png’
Time: 00:00.10 (Saving: 00:00.08)

removing image c_low_normal.png
Total baking time: 0:00:08.759338
Info: Cant bake curvature without baking normal first! Add normal map bake before curvature map. Disabling this pass

I have tried normal maps world and tangent, before and after the curvature map.

Edit:

not sure how but seems to be working now