Hi, first of all i use BakeTool for my baking chores, and this may seem rather elemental, but i don’t think i’ve ever read, together in one statement, that you must create both a UV map AND a new blank image when baking a procedural texture to an object? The few tutorials i’ve seen show that when using a tool such as BakeTool, you just need to enable the auto UV Unwrap and hit Bake. Well, i do that, and afterwards i see the UV map it created, but how do i KNOW that my procedural texture has indeed been baked to my mesh. The UV map only shows the verts, lines, and polygons, but no actual data (color/image) from my procedural.
Could the answer to my own question be that you must create a new blank image when baking a procedural, but you don’t need to create one when baking from an image file?! Much thanks for any clarification on this…
The target bake is an image, you cant bake to vertex colour data or polygons or anything… this image needs to be referenced by the 3d object some how… which means it needs to reference the 3d objects uvs.
with the bake you can set whatever image is your target image… but that would be destructive if you set it to something already in the scene, thats why you create a new one.
…that would be destructive if you set it to something already in the scene, thats why you create a new one
oh ok, yeah that makes sense.
…so then, both procedural textures and image file textures must both have a new ‘target’ image before a successful bake can be achieved. So an image file (e.g. rocks.png) still has to have a 2nd image created in order to bake that image file onto it… correct?
One last question, which may sound kinda lame, but, how do i KNOW, what proof is there in Blender, that a baked object has indeed been baked? Tutorials say baked items render/redraw faster, but since my monitor and pc is slow to begin with, it’s hard to tell if a render is faster or slower than before the bake. It ‘seems’ that if something’s been baked, it wouldn’t display pixelated noise on the baked item when moving it around in the Render display-view with the mouse. And since the Material display-view isn’t as precise (hi-res) as the Render view, i can’t see or tell if it’s been baked there either. I mean i’ve baked stuff before and saw the diffuse/colors on the UV map afterwards, but still, isn’t there something that (literally) proves an object has had an image permanently baked onto it so i won’t be wondering all the time?