I can preview my materials fine with Eevee, but to bake them into textures I have to use Cycles.
Wouldn’t it make sense to bake the textures with Eevee as well? It would be much faster and provide results closer to the 3D preview.
I wonder if this is a planned feature?
I’ve started learning Substance Painter and I see it’s very well optimized to cache texture data and it renders them very fast, compared to my usual Blender-only workflow.
It would be faster. I made a HLSL baking utility once, wrote vertices to UV coords instead of perspective space, ran much faster than 60fps. Techniques like that could be used for real-time baking, although I doubt devs want to support that.
As far as closer to the 3D preview, ehh, maybe, maybe not. If there aren’t going to be any problems, then there aren’t going to be any for Cycles either. There’s zero challenge in baking emitted Musgrave color… But there are plenty of pitfalls (like the fact that there isn’t ny particular view vector) and those are going to cause problems in either. Sometimes, worse for Eevee, because it’s working with rendering models that collapse the entire 3D space to projection space.
Considering somewhere I read something like “Eevee doesn’t support baking yet” (emphasis mine) I expect that this is planned.