GrabDoc | Environment art friendly baking add-on

Hello once again Blender Artists community! I have come back to share with everyone my next add-on, Blender GrabDoc! More or less it is an add-on for previewing all of your trim sheets maps live and once happy baking/exporting them out. It also has bridging support for Marmoset Toolbag if you prefer accuracy over usability. It is entirely free and will always be free so try it out if you are at all interested. :smile:

I donā€™t have much to say here that isnā€™t already said in the product page so check that out if you are curious for more details on it.

Here is a video done by one of my partners on the project that gives a great overview of the add-on:

And here is the link to the actual add-on:

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This is an extremely well designed toolset. Great work. :+1:

Does the auto-baked material get reapplied in Blender, or is this a planned feature? Node Wrangler addon can auto-setup a PBR mat from a selection of maps. Maybe this could be utilised to auto-pick the Toolbag baked maps and set up the material in Blender?

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Thanks for the kind words :smile:

So the only exported map you can currently preview inside of Blender after baking is Normals using the ā€˜re-import as matā€™ option. As the option says, the normal map will get re-imported into the scene as a material that you can then apply to whatever objects you want. I could have a button that applies it to every selected object if that is what you are looking for, otherwise that is the current implementation. Thinking about it I donā€™t think it actually works if you use the Marmoset Toolbag baker, I should probably add that to the to-do list.

As far as utilizing other add-ons to get the job done I donā€™t want to depend on a user installing something else regardless of if it is built-in or not, would just implement the functionality myself at that point.

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Finally got the opportunity to post the add-on on my Artstation. It contains some cool GIFs showing the add-on in action, so check it out if that interests you at all :smile:

https://www.artstation.com/artwork/WKmwzG

Very nice!

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Stunning work, very nice workflow all together :slight_smile:

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Hi, I am getting this error when I try to activate it.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Blender\blender-2.83.10-windows64\2.83\scripts\modules\addon_utils.py", line 382, in enable
    mod.register()
  File "C:\Users\kkostovas\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.83\scripts\addons\BlenderGrabDoc_v1_1 Pro\__init__.py", line 28, in register
    mod.register()
  File "C:\Users\kkostovas\AppData\Roaming\Blender Foundation\Blender\2.83\scripts\addons\BlenderGrabDoc_v1_1 Pro\ui.py", line 526, in register
    bpy.utils.register_class(cls)
ValueError: validating class:: 'HEADER_LAYOUT_EXPAND' not found in ('DEFAULT_CLOSED', 'HIDE_HEADER')

But v1 installs fine in Blender 2.83.

EDIT:
Oh, I was told from another addon discussion it might just be the 2.83.

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Yes! I think the feature was introduced in 2.90ā€¦ Updating would be a good idea. If you are using an LTS version for production work I would just recommend using 1.0 :slight_smile:

A little late but wanted to wait for the first patch of v1.1ā€¦ Which is out! Big changes with a complete overhaul of the internal systems and UI, a port to 2.91, new operators for quickly setting up object level Mat IDs and better Curvature!

Grab it at the usual Gumroad link, here.

Check out the full list of patch notes here, one of the biggest yet for any of my releases on any of my tools.

Usual support for the release, shoot me an email via [email protected] or join the Discord Support Server for the same service.

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No worries, I definitely plan to move to 2.91 at some point. :smile:

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Hi Iā€™ve had this addon purchased for some time now but today needed to use it, when ever i try to export it says ā€œthere is no export path setā€ even though i have one set ?

not really sure what Iā€™m doing wrong.

it seems you have to use the exact path and not // that references where blender file is saved.

Hey Lamia, I can look into thisā€¦ but yes using the folder icon next to the export path to set the direct path is recommended :slight_smile:

Hey after using this addon a lot more any chance of being able to bake out albido, roughness, metal as well as emissions i have been using this a lot lately for also making decals for my game where ill do most of everything in blender then bake them down to be used right in UE4 currently i have a hack way of screen capping the other maps i need thanks for the addon!

Also im not expecting material bakes from marmoset as moving shaders over from one software to an other is going to be a lot of work.

I donā€™t have much time nowadays to develop for GrabDocā€¦ Albedo, roughness etc is requests I receive often and would be at the top of my to-do if I had the opportunity to work on it more :slight_smile:

Question: If you export your objects with materials that could potentially be baked as an albedo (or anything) could you just enable that bake option in Marmoset after the imports and bake, would that work as a workaround? I know shader stuff wonā€™t go over but I know basic things like color do.

HI first of all thank you, fantastic addon I use it often, itā€™s really really good :slight_smile: :+1:
just for info (I know itā€™s just an alpha) but bake AO in 2.93 is mitigate (attenuate ) even if you boost it
here an example with the same value .

I think you could do it with really basic things like color nodes and image textures maybe even math functions. but anything out side of that would get really complicated. though im not really sure how worth it it would be outside simple colors and texture maps seeing as the point would be using the power of blender shaders to bake out generated textures.

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Hmm, something most likely changed with Blender internally here. I can increase the max value in the next patch :slight_smile:

Awesome you rock :wink: :+1:

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v1.2 has been dropped! Itā€™s not the biggest release compared to v1.1, focusing on QOL and general usabilityā€¦ but nonetheless there is still new stuff to play with :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Grab it here: https://gumroad.com/l/grabdoc

Patch Notes: https://gumroad.com/razed/posts

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