So I decided to open up blender again to see what’s changed and try something out.
Basically I’ve got a logo I’ve imported as SVG and a wall behind it, I’ve used the node editor to create some paint like texture which I want to bake to save on render time.
I’ve been searching for hours and watched many videos on baking but I’ve got to be doing something wrong.
Add plane, use nodes, unwrap plane, open uv editor, add new image, add image texture node, set to new image name, make sure node is selected, bake.
This yields a black square. On top of that it breaks the animation I’ve made and has also resulted in a videocard driver crash.
I guess you are using cycles since BI is barely able to screw up your graphics card…
Your process in nearly correct - only thing is: your material must still have attached its “unbaked” material nodes to the output when you click bake (make sure the texture you want to bake to is selected - I forgot to do that):
Also don’t forget to save the baked texture on your hard drive, otherwise it will be lost if you close & restart blender…
It is nearly impossible that texture baking breaks any kind of animation - check carefully if something else destroyed your work.
A graphics driver crash can be caused if you render with cycles and set too crazy samples, resolution or materials/textures. For test purposes limit resolution and samples and see if it works without crashing and then increase the values in small steps to find out how far you can go
Basically it was going to take me 9 hours to render out 3 seconds (at 1080p) so I was trying to minimize that agony. I think there’s a problem with baking things if you’re using gpu based rendering.
I did finally manage to get baking working when switching to CPU rendering.
What I learnt along the way was even at 4096x4096 the image quality wasn’t great (I’m zoomed right in at the beginning) so with a combination of changing the texture nodes/technique and tweaking the render settings I was able to get that 9 hours down to an hour and a half.
Thanks Luke, well at least it wasn’t me being a doughnut and missing something obvious, it was down to baking not working with GPU rendering.
The ‘breaking’ the animation thing was the gpu going full tilt in the background (without me realizing) and me not selecting the right object to see the keyframes
Good point about the saving of the image, seems odd that Blender wouldn’t embed it somehow. That’d be a nightmare if you deleted all the nodes etc.
Good you’ve managed.
Yep, i did bake-paint-over-and-bake-again… This is why i asked ‘what’ you’re baking. Since material for my second plane was set as Emission and baking was for a Diffuse Color i would get a black plane if i had not changed material (or what to bake) beforehand.
