Many objects should re-use the same material so tweaking it once should affect all objects. I want to bake individual texture under cycles for each of the objects using the same material.
Could anyone point to how should I properly re-use the same material for different objects when texture baking (not rendering) with cycles?
right now the problem is that whenever I select different object for baking - before pressing ‘bake’ I need to switch the texture manually in material nodes, and at some point earlier baked objects suddenly get that newly selected texture in texture viewing mode.
When you bake textures with cycles, you need to give it a “Image Texture” node in the node editor (its a place holder for uv’s, baked map can be saved separately). you need to select it for proper bake as well.
You can apply same material to many objects, but every object needs its own uv space to have those texture baked.
Guessing from your post, you are trying to bake texture for separate objects, not joined.
So, the best way is to first bake the textures for first object. Save the output with object name and map name.
Then select the other object ( Go to edit mode , and in uvimage editor window, ensure you have selected the previously created Image Texture (place holder) ) and bake for the selected object. Again save the resulting image with object and map name.
Repeat it for every object.
When done. delete the materials. Assign new materials to the objects, and add up maps. (in my few try, i added emission with the image texture, and it give very good results without any light or ao or env map. it was lot faster to render, with less noise).
That’s exactly the problem, I am not willing to delete CyclesBakeMaterial material and create/assign new ones with baked textures for each of my separate objects since I will go for tweaks in CyclesBakeMaterial and another round of texture bakes, then again one etc… Problem here is not so much to bake each object one by one but the inability to switch at any given point to texture view and look at my creation so each object having my CyclesBakeMaterial would display its appropriate baked texture without messing with CyclesBakeMaterial nodes.
In other words if material in its node defines a texture it will bake to and display in texture mode then I do not see how it can be used with multiple seperate objects having the same material? In Blender baking it was properly done by linking UVMap with the texture file… for Cycles either I am not getting something right or it really defines the texture for bake and display.
Obviously - one might want to reuse material for many different objects and if change is needed in material - it is done only in one place and whole scene gets affected by the change. Right now I am not sure what the workflow should look like to easily operate with single material/multiple objects.