Compositing Texture Bakes

Support Compositing and Post Processing
1

Hello all,

I’ve been working with Blender for the last six months learning how to do texture baking for architectural visualization. The biggest problem I’ve run into with Blender’s texture baking feature is that it’s very hard to do a bake without a lot of noise. Generally speaking, I have to do 512 samples on an 8192^2 png to get anything that looks good, and even then there is a lot of noise on the textures close up. This problem is compounded by the fact that Blender’s denoising feature doesn’t work with baking. More importantly to this thread, I can’t seem to get texture bakes into the compositor. I’m fairly new to Blender, and very new to the compositor, so I can rule out an error on my part. Does anyone have experience compositing baked textures, or do they simply not work?

2

Maybe you’re talking about some denoising with applying the depeckle node or bilateral blur to the indirect passes? if so, the pipeline is the same as for usual render layers. You can bake separate passes in different textures, and then filter them in compositor, combine again, and save to file. I cannot imagine another scenario of using the compositor for baked textures. And what about the noise - it’s the way it is. Try to render any still image with your lighting setup and passes, and sampling setting. See if the noise is there. Then notice that on any still you have only the few of your in-scene faces visible, and when you bake, you bake all the faces at once. Here we have huge render time.

And I have a question too. :slight_smile: How do you use those baked textures later. I’ve tried hard to short render time in animations with baking, but with no luck. There is no way in cycles to assist rendering with partially baked data. The only use is for very basic shaders with no reflections at all. It means no PBR, of course. Maybe I’m wrong, and baking could be used in some scenarios, except for creating basic albedo for game engines?