Tips & Tricks

Various tips and tricks to optimize your workflow and help you make the most of the features.

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Tooltips & Help

Understanding the properties and buttons is essential for fully utilizing all the features of this addon. Tooltips are available to assist you by showing descriptions when you hover your cursor over a button or property.

If tooltips aren’t appearing, they may be disabled. To enable them, go to the Preferences window, find the Interface section, and enable tooltips under the Display panel.

Most buttons and properties are also linked to their respective sections in the user manual, accessible in your browser. To view these, Right Click on a property or button and select the Online Manual option from the pop-up menu.

GPU Rendering

The render device setting is crucial for optimizing texture baking efficiency. Selecting a compatible GPU can significantly reduce bake times. To change this setting, open the Preferences window and navigate to the System section.

Within the Cycles render device panel, choose the render device that matches your graphics card. The correct option depends on your GPU type: CUDA and OptiX are for NVIDIA GPUs, HIP is for AMD GPUs, and oneAPI is for Intel GPUs. For more information, refer to the Blender manual.

Presets Utilization

Presets are highly useful for quickly switching between settings for different tasks. You can create presets for bake list items, texture and object exports, bake settings, and more. The process for creating and loading presets is explained in detail in the Presets section.

Confirm Dialogs

Bake session control buttons (start, cancel, confirm, etc.) trigger confirmation popups that must be accepted to execute the button's function. These popups can be permanently disabled or bypassed by holding the CTRL key while clicking.

Bake By Material

In addition to manually adding and configuring items for the bake list, you can also export items from materials using the load by linked option.

Enabling the queue gate option ensures that only the textures associated with the shader socket used by the object's materials will be baked.

Baked Version

When baking objects with the final material and final object options enabled, along with the apply textures option, a baked version of the object and its materials is created.

Upon confirming the bake session, you have the option to replace the original baked object with this newly created final version.

In-line List Item Edit

The properties of the bake list and tile list items can be edited using additional methods beyond the default approach. Inline editing for these properties can be enabled in the Preferences window.

Extrusion Visualization

When baking textures from source objects to a target object, the extrusion value plays a crucial role in determining how the textures will be baked. Therefore, it's important to have visibility of the set values in the viewport. The extrusion value can be visualized using a single option, and the visualizer will display real-time changes to the extrusion value as they occur.

Cage Generation

When baking textures from source objects to a target object, a cage object can be used instead of an extrusion value. Normally you would have to create this cage object yourself, but with the cage generation button it can be easily created. The extrusion value can also be applied to the cage object. When the cage object is created, it is automatically set as the cage object.

Source Object Location

When baking textures from source objects to a target object, the source objects must be positioned relative to the target object. This process can be automated using the copy source location option. However, this requires that the origins of the source objects are aligned with the origin of the target object.

Hiding Unused Maps

Unused bake maps can be set to not be visible, so they won't get in the way when setting up the bake list. Head over to the preferences and expand the type visibility option.

The disabled maps will no longer be visible in the map menu. When a bake map is disabled, it will also not be imported when using the load by linked option.

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New tips and tricks are continuously added, if you have one let me know about it!