Suppose I’m making materials using cycles nodes, from only 1 base image I found on cgtextures. I finally tweak tens of nodes to get exactly the material I want, but I don’t want to redo that anymore.
Is there a way to “bake” my final material in order to generate an Albedo + Normalmap + Heightmap + Specular + etc? I wouldn’t need “UV Unwrapping”, as all I’m doing is simply placing the material on a plane with some lights in order to get the one material correct. Also, I would like the rendered materials to become the same dimensions as the one original texture image (perhaps larger if that would be beneficial).
I guess you could say I’m trying to use blender to give me the same output you’d get from AwesomeBump, CrazyBump, etc.
Is this possible, and if so, how would I go about it?
What I do to get the same size everything is base it all on blender units. Set the camera to orthographic view and the scale to X, X being blender units. Scale your baking plane and objects to fit X exactly by going off 0,0,0 location. I end up with scene size that 6x6 blender units. X +3, -3 to Y +3, -3. Why 6? I have no idea, it’s just what I use. If your making lots of really small objects, then you might want to double the blender units so you can work with objects that are double the size. Scale them back down when you’re done if you need them to scale correctly for a scene.
It sounds like your object is a flat plane with a texture. Normal maps and height maps go off of the z axis on your object, so you need a third dimension to get a good bake or render. But if its just one flat face, your normal map will turn out as one flat color, as well as your height map. I never did anything with other maps yet, but I imagine it will turn out the same. Nodes can add geometry but I’m not sure if it will be enough to get the desirable result
If by larger, you mean a higher resolution, then you just change the resolution output in your render setting. You might be stuck using the same resolution as the original image. While your normal maps and height maps, ect can be done in higher resolution, the diffuse material might just end up looking stranger the higher you go up in resolution. But diffuse will become less noticeable with the better your maps you manage to bake. I have terrible looking materials that are shockingly better when I put my normal map on it.
Go ahead and throw a high poly sphere under your baking plane and bake a normal map of it. You will quickly see what a nice normal map is supposed to look like. I found normal maps baked from for other software or examples on the internet or in tutorials to be not so good.