Baking Textures from Materials in Blender

1. Introduction: Hey guys, in this class, we'll learn how to bake textures from materials in Blender. What is it all about? To make things clear? Let's use a real example. Here's a model of a UFO that I created in Blender. Very basic. By the way, I ought to have a class on how to create such a model. So feel free to watch it. I added some materials to it. Here we can see it in the tulip preview shading. It looks pretty decent. I think. This is the top part. This is the bottom part. Now let's export it to GL Tf and input eight to, let's say panda 3D, which is a game engine. By the way, I'm going to create another class soon on how to export models from Blender in a gtf format and input them to spend a 3D. Anyway, as you can see in Pandas 3D, all the colors are gone. This is because in panda 3D or in other software where you want to use the model, you need textures. So is there a way to create a texture using the materials that we have? Fortunately, the race. And this is where you're going to do in this class. If you want to create a texture from immaterial in blender, you have to beg it. Let's demonstrate it on the model of the UFO. Open the blend file in Blender, and let's get down to work. But before we start, here's some info for you. 2. Mark Seams: Now there are two materials in our project. So we'll have to take care of both. But first things first, let's start by creating a nap and UV unwrapping our model. But in order to do the ladder will have to mark some sings. And our model, which we're going to do in this lesson, seems other places where our model will be cut before we flatten it on a surface, which we call UV unwrapping. But first, let's create a UV map. Select the UFO model, and go to the Object Data tab, which is over here. Under UV maps. Click on the plus sign button to create a new user map, rename it bake. Also make sure the newly created using map is the one that is selected. Now, this is a simple model. We'll add just a couple of seams to add. The first scene will be added on the perimeter of the spaceship. Go to Edit Mode. By hitting Tab edge select mode, front view, hit one on your numpad. Zoom in. Now, let's select the edge loop. In the middle on the perimeter. Just hold down Alt and click on one of the edges. This will select the whole loop. Then go to the Azure menu and select mark scheme. Now the color changes to red, which means a siem has been added here. Now the same where the model will be cut for texturing. We'll add another scene at the base of the cockpit. So let's select the edge loop just above the blue material. So again, hold down Alt and click on one of the edges. Now with ellipse selected, go to edge and select mark seam. Have two seems marked the perimeter here. Now we can get rid of the phases on the top part of the body that are covered by the cockpit. We need to go into see them anyway. Now to make it easier for us, let's temporarily hide the cockpit in edit mode, deselect all. And then hover your mouse cursor or the cockpit and hit L. This will select just the cockpit. Now hit H to hide the cockpit. Now let's go to top view by hitting seven on your noun pad. And let's go to face select mode and press C to activate the circle select tool. And let's get rid of all the phases here inside this marked seem, except the ones in the outermost ring. Because otherwise there would be a narrow gap after removing the phases. So we can now scroll our mouse wheel to make the circle larger. Like this. And press the left mouse button to select the faces that we want. Or we could alternatively select them one by one or in groups. Now, to deactivate the circle select tool, just right-click your mouse. Now, we can delete the phases by pressing X and selecting faces. Now we have an opening under the carpet. You will see it better if you orbit your scene. Here is the opening. This way we have a couple of vertices less to work with later in the game. Now we're ready to UV unwrap the model. 3. UV-Unwrap Your Model: Now in the previous part, we added some seems to our model. Now ready to UV unwrap it. What does it actually mean? Uv unwrapping is the process of arranging the phases of the model on a flat surface where they can be painted or where we can add an image texture to them. This way we can decide what the texture should look like on the model. So let's get to work. Hit alt plus H to unhide the cockpit. Now, go to UV Editing Workspace we use here. In the 3D view port. Here. Select all hit a and under UD, select the first option, unwrap. This is what we get. Well, this will do for our purposes. It isn't perfect, but it will do for our purposes. Now. You can see the islands, the particular islands on the left in the UV editor. So each part here is a separate island. You could also select the items in iron slag mode like this. You don't have to do that. Now, let's de-select all. 4. Add the Image Texture and UV Map Nodes: Let's go to the shading workspace, which is here. And under Materials in the material tab, let's select the body of material in the shader editor at an image texture node. To do that, just shift a. Then under Texture. Select image texture. This is the node will be baking our texture too. Also add a UV map node. You can do it by hitting Shift and selecting it from the input sub menu. So input UV map. Let's zoom in a bit. Now let's connect the UV map. So UV socket with the image textures vectors suck it. Make sure these two nodes are not connected to any other nodes. Then in the UV map node, select the bake you the map we just created. Bake. Good. Next, we have to create the image. We want to bake two. To do that, hit the new button on the image texture node. Give the image a name like UF. Extra. Set both width and height to 20482048. By 2048. Or you can use higher values. The higher resolution the energy need, the larger values you should use, preferably the powers of two. You can uncheck Alpha because we don't need transparency information here. Finally, hit the Okay button to create the image. Now, select the UV map and image texture nodes. So hold down Shift and select this one to zoom out a bit. Press Control plus C to copy them. Then select the lights material in the material tab, and paste the two nodes in the shader editor. You can do it by simply pressing Control plus v. Now select just the image texture node in the light material shader editor. Back in the bottom material shader editor. Also select just the image texture node. 5. Bake the Texture: In order to be able to beg a texture, we have to use the cycles for indoor engineering. Go to the render tab, which is over here. And select the Cycles Render Engine. We have Evie, we need cycles. Then under bake, bake type to diffuse. This is the type of texture we need under contributions, unchecked, direct and indirect, so that the light does not contribute to how to diffuse map Luke's. All we wanted to contribute as the color. Also uncheck clear image and or output. Finally, make sure the UFO object is selected in the 3D viewport or outliner. It is selected, we can see hit the back button. It will take some time to beg the texture. Here we can see the process. Now let me pause the video and I'll be back. As soon as the textures are baked. In the baking is done, you will see the image in the image editor over here. Let's zoom out a bit to say it. Now click the button with three horizontal lines and select under Image, Save As name the image. You have o texture PNG, and hit Save As image. 6. Test the Texture: In the previous part of baked our texture, but that's it really work. Let's check out. Now go to the layout workspace, which is here. In order to keep our original model intact and safe in case anything goes wrong. Well, let's test the texture on a duplicate. So select the UFO and hit Shift D to duplicate. And move it aside so that the two UFOs don't overlap. Here. Then go to the Material tab and select each of the materials one-by-one and delayed them, which you can do by hitting the minus button over here. Now the duplicate has no materials attached to it. Then let's add a new material and set base color to image texture. Now let's open the UFO texture PNG image we just created. Open. You have a texture PNG. We don't see the texture on our model has orbital. Now we can see the texture on the model, but it doesn't look as expected. This is because there are two uv maps and we only need one. Go to the Object tab. Select the UV map. Under a UV maps, there's one, not the one we created, just the first one. Hit the minus button to remove it. Now, the texture looks good. Now, if you zoom in, you is see that as opposed to the original model, the texture is pixelated. This is because it's a bitmap image. The size of the image was set to 2048 by 2048, for our purposes, this will do there. You can now delete the original one. X to delete. We now have just this one. So let's put it in the middle of the world. Let's select it. Shift S, selection to cursor. Provided the cursor is in the middle of the world. Good. We are now ready to export the textured model to panda 3D or any other software. We can use it for your game simulation or other purposes. 7. Conclusion: Now we know how to create a texture for materials created in Blender. This is something you will probably be doing pretty often if you're thinking about myelin game assets in Blender. Alternatively, you can use ready-made textures that you can create yourself or download from one of many online services. Baking textures, feel free to experiment with the image size. We need different sizes for different models. One more thing. Before I wrap it up, we're interested in how to export the model created in Blender to gtf format, for example, in order to use it later in a game engine like panda 3D. Stay tuned for my next class, exporting GIFs ETF models from Blender depend a through D, where I'm going to talk about it in detail.