I wanted to know if it is possible to bake something without using the principled BSDF in blender.
Most of my bakes use no external light (not even World) and an Emission node, no Principled BSDF node. So yes, itâs possible. Not saying that Emission is the way to go for what youâre doing with the Light Paths though, and I canât tell whatâs causing your problem.
But there is only different colors when light is around, soo light is needed
With a nodetree as you have, baking wonât work.
Remove the LightPath, the MathNode, the top left Add Shader and the last MixShader; They arenât doing anything.
Add an ImageTexture node, create a new texture, and then Bake the âCombinedâ.
Without this step, thereâs nothing to bake.
i know that i need an image texture to bake. I tried this many times but the image texture just comes out a lot darker or with a lot of errors.
As Secrop notes above, thatâs not the only issue. What have you done about the rest of it?
More info (including the oft-mentioned please post the blend file, or a version of it that has the problem and has been truncated to get under the forumâs 5k limit) could be helpful. As a new user your ability to upload files here is restricted (you could use an outside service and link here), but now that youâve posted a few times you might be able to do it.
Ok im going to leave the blender file here. The file as a lot of things because ive been experimenting a lot lately to get this to work but yea. Thank you by the way.
Your Bowl object has some issuesâŚ
First, you should to âApplyâ all modifiers to the geometry. And then, flip the Normals so that they point outside.
Itâs puzzling to me how people can talk about baking without discussing the goal of it. âBakingâ is just saving something to a texture. âŚor not even a texture. 
Just basically saving some per-computed data. It can be done to store geometry details, various light information, surface properties, procedural textures, to remap textures to different UV maps and for other purposes. Without the context, nobody knows what anybody is talking about. But that doesnât seem to bother anyone here.
Welcome 
âŚ
For the bowlâŚ
âŚyou have multiple Material Output nodes in your setup⌠even connecting an image directly to the (shader) outputâŚ
âŚand i did not search all the objects ( Circel, Cube, Cube.001.. ..Cube.008, potato.001.. ..potato.004 ) to find the material with the shader you showedâŚ
If you want help⌠you should make it easy for potential helpers to help you⌠saves a lot of time for everyone⌠
Yes, and OP said that the file had some experiments⌠But my first post (about the nodetree) is still part of the answer.
And the problem in this thread ( â[âŚ] it just comes out black.â) is caused by flipped normals, which logically are very important to sample direct/indirect illumination (samples were just being thrown inside the object).
Thatâs a hint in the same direction⌠tidy up the shader⌠(modifiers,⌠two solidfiyâŚ)
âŚalsoâŚ
Have not seen any difference when cutting the Lightpath⌠but some actual color for the emmision:
First of all im sorry for not organizing the blender file⌠im so stressed with this that i didnt even think of doing that. And thanks a lot to all the people that responded, as you all can see im a bit new to blender so yea thank you all for helping.
So the problem with the colors is fixed! but now the texture is all bugged out, i think that this can be because of the normals? but i dont really know how to fix this
Using solidify modifier gives you geometry⌠but no UVâs at the new edges⌠you have to apply the modifer and unwrap the edge to get a vomplet unwrapped object⌠so you also get different UVâs for the inner and outer part.
Well⌠you might have to unwrap the newly solidifierd bowl⌠a bit mote suited ⌠?? The outer part could almost like before then add the new edge and the upper part of the inner part⌠the part âin the soupâ may not need any big UV islands at all⌠
This is so confusing, im going to try what you said but i didnt really understand it.
