Baking Maps in Blender - Baking Nodes

Hey all–

So I followed along with THIS tutorial for baking high poly to low poly…

All is well, but at the 4:00 mark of the tutorial HERE, I don’t know how to bake the additional nodes that he doesn’t explain. I don’t know if I need to bake the node into a roughness texture (when I do what I think I should do, the map remains black–seen in attached image).

All the other nodes you see I got to work fine: color, norms, and cavity (AO)…but I can’t get a roughness map. How do I get a separate roughness map baked? Or do I use the cavity map as the roughness? What if I wanted them to be different?

In this node structure, the color ramp and mix are blended with color and cavity to produce the roughness right now…but I want that map to be different right? If I gave the PBR textures to an asset, I don’t want cavity and roughness to be the same do I?

I basically want to use the viewer node outcome for the roughness–but it doesn’t seem to want to bake there for me to save. What am I doing wrong?

You’ll see in the second link video at the 4:00 mark, he goes on to explain two things you need to do to bake out the color and roughness…but it’s confusing. Anyone got a sec to watch the last bit of that video? Thank so much!

Take the output of your color ramp (or whatever you’re plugging into the viewer node), plug it directly into Material Output, bypassing the Viewer, and bake ‘Emit’.

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Awesome. So, emit works for roughness too ya? I figured it looked like a roughness map also…I already have an emit bake for the cavitty/ao map…can’t I just use that for roughness in PBR? But if my color ramp is different (mix of color and cavity/ao) then that will bake differently then my straight cavity map I guess…

Now I thought I did this already. But it never baked anything new in the black roughness texture…Maybe it’s the viewer node that was the issue…

Thanks!

OK guys, to clear up MY confusion, and maybe other people shared this experience…

The fix was to UN-tic the ‘Selected to Active’ for separate node baking. I’m no longer using the high poly for these bakes, and that was causing an error and confusing me.

Thanks all!