Texture Baking

Basic Settings

• Render Engine: Cycles

  • Required for full baking features. Eevee does not support baking.

• Device: GPU Compute

  • Recommended for faster baking performance.

Bake Panel

• Bake Type: Combined

  • Bakes all lighting and shading information (Direct + Indirect light, Diffuse, Glossy, Transmission, and Emit) into a single texture.

  • Ideal for generating albedo + lighting baked into one image.

Influence

These checkboxes define what gets baked into the texture:

• Lighting

  • Direct: Direct light hitting the surface.

  • Indirect: Light that bounces off other surfaces.

• Contributions

  • Diffuse: Base color and diffuse light.

  • Glossy: Reflections and specular.

  • Transmission: Transparency and refraction.

  • Emit: Emissive materials (self-illuminating).

Selected to Active

If checked, allows baking from one object to another (e.g., high-poly to low-poly for normal maps). Leave unchecked for standard baking.

Output

• Target: Image Textures

  • Choose where the baked data will be saved — usually to an image texture node selected in the Shader Editor.

• Clear Image

  • Clears the image before baking. Make sure this is checked if you want a clean bake.

Margin

• Type: Adjacent Faces

  • Extends baked pixels to avoid seams in UV islands.

• Size: 16 px

  • The number of pixels to bleed beyond UV borders. Higher values help hide seams.