Soulburn Studios Art Lessons

Texture Baking: Baking A Pattern To Use In A Different Renderer Or 3D App
By Neil Blevins
Created On: Dec 16th 2013
Updated On: July 10th 2025
Software: Blender or 3dsmax

So lets say you have a textured model in your 3d application of choice, and your material includes some nodes that are specific to your 3d application and renderer. As an example, say you're in 3dsmax and are using the Arnold Renderer and used Arnold specific nodes in your material. Now you want to either render your model in a different renderer within the same 3d application, or use it in another 3d application entirely (like Blender or Unreal Engine). While some material nodes may transfer, many will not, and so you have to completely redo your texturing. This is where Texture Baking comes in. Texture Baking allows you to take any node or series of nodes in your material and "bake" it into a series of texture maps. Think of it like flattening your node tree into a single node that calls a texture map. Editing the texture isn't as simple as editing the nodes (you'll need to rebake), but the texture map is compatible with almost any application you want to use. This can let you use a different renderer, use the model in a different application, or in some cases render the model faster in your current application, all without having to redo your texturing. Think of texture baking as a way to take one method for placing your texture onto a surface and transfer it to a new placement method (usually UVs).

Blender Example

So lets say you have a material in Blender that contains procedural nodes in the node tree hooked up to the color of your material. And you want to transfer the model to Unreal Engine. Time to take that color texture and bake!

Here's the basic steps:

1) Make sure object has UVs
2) Go to the Shading workspace
3) In one of the left hand windows, create a new UV Editor view
4) Click "new image" button to create a new texture map
5) Create a 4k texture, rename BakedColor
6) Create new image texture node in your material graph, don't hook it up to anything, switch that node to your BakedColor texture
7) Switch to render tab
8) Switch renderer to Cycles
9) Go to Bake section in the Render Tab
10) Bake type: Diffuse to bake the color (or whatever part of your material you want to bake)
11) Turn off direct and indirect (we don't want lighting, only the pure color or value)
12) Select the object and Select the texture node you want to write to (not from)
13) Click Bake button
14) Once the bake is complete (look for the progress bar at the lower part of the screen), go to the UV Editor view which should now have your baked image, click Image, Save, save your texturemap file

3dsmax Example

So lets say you have a material in 3dsmax that contains an Arnold specific map in the node tree. And you want to render it now in vray, still incisde of 3dsmax. Time to take that texture and bake!

For this tutorial, you'll need my Soulburn Script pack, as you'll be using the texmapBaker Script.

1) Select your objects
2) Open the Classic Material Editor and have active the map you want to bake.
3) Open the texmapBaker UI

4) Choose the path you want to bake to (this will write out one bitmap per object into this path, each file named after the object.)
5) Since my objects don't already have UVs, I'm choosing Automatic UV Unwrap
6) Turn on Map Switcher, set to VrayMuliSubTex (since we're going to render the final result in vray)
7) Hit Apply.
8) You'll now have a series of texture written out to that directory...

9) You also now have in slot 2 of your Material Editor a vray VrayMultiSubTex map that's pointing to all of these maps...

10) And if you check out your objects, they each have an Object ID that's been set to match the maps and their place in the Multi-Map...

11) Now replace the incomatible map in your map chain with your newly created Multi-Map.
12) Change renderer to vray, and hit render

There you go, you can now use any map inside of vray.

There are some disadvantages of this technique:

Since you have all of these bitmaps, you're now probably going to use up a lot more texture memory than using the original map.
And if you tweak your original map, you'll have to redo your baking process.

For more information on which Switcher map to use and which ID type to choose, read my lesson on Switchers And IDs, Which To Use When.