Inconsistand color when baking 2K vs 4K roughness

Support Materials and Textures
1

I am attempting to bake the materials in my latest project to files for use outside of Blender. They look great (IMO) within Blender, but I run into a few problems when baking. I have come to terms with the fact that I am just going to lose detail if I bake a 2K texture from a material that is using 4K maps for parts of it. Please let me know if that is not the case and I am just missing something. My big problem is this: When I bake roughness to a 2K (2048x2048) I get the roughness I expect. Except for 100% glass regions that turn out almost completely inverted. When I bake a 4K variant of the same thing however, The resulting output is too light, resulting in a surface that is too rough! I’m sure I must be doing something wrong here.

The original renders straight from Blender.

1-20_C_001
1-20_C_0011080×1080 171 KB

1-20_C_217
1-20_C_2171080×1080 142 KB

The same object rendered with materials baked to 2K output files.

1-22_2K_Bake_001
1-22_2K_Bake_0011080×1080 159 KB

1-22_2K_Bake_217
1-22_2K_Bake_2171080×1080 131 KB

And the 4K output files…

1-22_4K_Bake_001
1-22_4K_Bake_0011080×1080 143 KB

1-22_4K_Bake_217
1-22_4K_Bake_2171080×1080 133 KB

The bake setup for the roughness map.

BakeSettings
BakeSettings451×897 47.9 KB

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated. Creating output files is probably the most frustrating thing I have ever encountered in Blender. I’m open to plug-ins that may solve the problem if this is just a case of Blender not doing something well on it’s own.

Thanks!

2

Roughness, or normals? Your bake screenshot is showing normals.

I guess Blender has roughness output now, but have you considered running your roughness values into emission and baking that instead? I don’t see why your glass would be getting inverted, and maybe checking our your nodes to reroute roughness to emission would give you a handle on why that’s happening. If not, it would at least get your a roughness map without that problem…

As for the 2k vs 4k thing, I would suspect that you probably set one to sRGB and the other to non-color. Blender uses your settings on the image texture node to figure out color management for bakes.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the pointers. Unfortunately, None of this actually got the result I wanted. I have actually found an add-on that I have only played with a little bit so far, but has some promising results.