So recently, I tried to baking a procedurally-generated texture so that it used for the game project I’ve been working on in Unreal Engine.
Following an online tutorial, I baked a diffuse map, a roughness map & a normal map. I then hooked up the three maps in the node editor, only to notice that the end result didn’t quite look right.
The cracks on the block aren’t nearly as defined as the original version and the colour seems to be a bit off. Why doesn’t it look right? Is there another map that I didn’t bake that I need? Or did the texture maps not bake properly?
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Baking is notorious for producing low-quality results. This is because those real-time materials or textures are now restricted to the size of your baked image.
Increasing image resolution [size] will help balance those restrictions and provide better quality results.
Cycles sampling is also a crucial detail, as it’s factored into the baking process. For example, having a low sample count of 32 is not going to produce aesthetically pleasing results, unless it’s for pixel-art.
Changing the sample count to a high value such as 128 or even a large value of 1024 can help greatly in bake quality. If you’re unsure of which value to pick, I’d suggest using the same value of your resolution scale i.e. 512x512 texture would have 512 samples.
Note: High samples can drastically slow down rendering times if a person’s hardware isn’t properly equipped.
Hi there!
What you may also do is to choose 32 bit float for the image you create. That way you will have much (much) more colour information stored, that should modify the looks as well. It is widely used for normal maps for this reason, it should immediately increase the quality of it. You may use it for the other maps as well, if image size is not that crucial for you. 
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