I’ve been working on a Blender add-on called Parallax Baker.
The goal of this project is to make it easier to convert a normal Blender scene into a lightweight animated parallax scene while preserving the original look as much as possible.
Below is a simple comparison from one of my current test scenes.
Left: Generated Parallax Scene Right: Original Blender Scene
Current features include:
Automatic parallax scene generation
Lighting bake
Shadow bake
Animated object baking
Automatic flipbook generation for doors and other animated objects
Export pipeline (currently working on Blender, Unity, and Unreal Engine workflows)
The add-on is still under active development, and I’m continuing to improve both the workflow and export pipeline.
The animation is what’s being baked, and it’s the one thing that makes this the most interesting.
Imagine you have a building, each with their own parallax rooms behind the windows. Some of these rooms can have people moving to and fro. It could add a lot of life to a scene with only minimal performace impacts.
The animated content of the result is definitely interesting, I guess I’m just not understanding what sort of full file output is being done here and how it’s being brought back in.
The main difference is that Eevee has some limitations due to how it handles depth information. For the best results, objects generally need to be arranged from front to back.
Cycles doesn’t have this limitation because it can reconstruct the scene in true 3D space during the baking process, allowing more complex layouts such as side walls or corner-shaped interiors.
Cool, but…
I think it would be more useful and self-explanatory, if you slightly rotate the camera while showing the two animations, the real and the baked.
So far, it just looks like a video on a plane
