OpenBake simplifies the often tedious and time-consuming process of baking textures by providing a streamlined workflow directly within the 3D Viewport. Instead of navigating through complex node setups and internal menus, you can manage your baking tasks through a clean and centralized interface with just a few clicks. By automating Blender's baking workflow, OpenBake can save you hours or even days of manual work on complex scenes.
This tool is built for developers and artists who value reliability and speed when preparing assets, especially for game engines or real-time applications. The add-on excels at handling complex scenarios, such as baking entire object hierarchies or creating custom texture atlases. It automatically merges multiple meshes into one optimized output object and creates copies of your original meshes to ensure a non-destructive workflow. OpenBake focuses on combined texture baking, which merges lighting, shadows, and material surface properties into one final, ready-to-use texture.
OpenBake-Demo.mp4
To start baking, simply select one or multiple meshes, which OpenBake will automatically merge into one combined output mesh. Then, enter the name that you want your baked output mesh to have, and make sure to choose an appropriate texture size and island margin. Optionally, you can also use OpenBake's additional settings, such as setting an angle limit for UV unwrapping, using a custom UV map, locking materials, baking the hierarchy, or saving the baked texture. Finally, add your settings and selection as an entry to the baking queue, along with any other entries you would like to bake, and click "Bake Meshes" to start the baking process. That's it.
OpenBake is designed to provide an intuitive and simple UI, while still offering access to powerful baking settings.
These settings include:
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Mesh Name: Name of the baked output mesh.
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Texture Size: Resolution of the baked texture.
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Angle Limit: Maximum allowed angle between neighboring faces before they are split into separate UV islands in the automatically generated UV map. Higher values create fewer and larger UV islands on curved surfaces, which may reduce blurring or visible seams, but can stretch the baked texture. Only applied if no custom UV map is used.
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Island Margin: Margin placed around each UV island and used for the UV island border pixel extension. For custom UV maps, only the border pixel extension is attempted. Larger island margins leave more room among UV islands, which may help prevent visible seams and overlapping UV islands, but they also reduce the image area available for baking, thus impacting the texture quality.
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Use UV Map: Provide a custom UV map name, and OpenBake will no longer create a bake UV map itself. Instead, if all selected meshes have a UV map with the provided name, OpenBake will use that UV map for baking the texture. This can be used to create a custom texture atlas.
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Lock Materials: Preserve the current appearance of meshes with materials which rely on object-specific data such as generated coordinates or object properties. By default, all selected meshes are joined before baking to reduce the bake time, but this changes object-specific data and can result in visual offsets. Enabling this option prevents offsets by detecting affected meshes, baking them separately, and joining them afterwards, but this may increase the bake time.
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Bake Hierarchy: Bake not only the current selection, but also all meshes beneath the current selection in the hierarchy, even if they are unselected. This allows for baking entire hierarchies by simply selecting the top-level object, such as a parent mesh or an empty, without having to select each mesh manually.
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Save Texture: Save baked textures to a custom directory.
How can I change the render settings for OpenBake?
OpenBake uses Blender's current render settings. Note that any settings under Blender's "Bake" section will be overwritten by OpenBake.
Why do my bakes have black seams?
If you experience black seams in your bakes, try turning off denoising. Black seams are a known issue with Blender's denoising and are not caused by OpenBake.
Why do my bakes have areas that are completely black?
Black areas are usually caused by inverted face normals, because bake rays start on a face's front side. Therefore, faces pointing inward bake black. By selecting the "Layout" tab, navigating to "Viewport Overlays" in the upper right corner, and enabling the "Face Orientation" checkbox, you can see the affected faces in red. Click on the mesh, switch to Edit Mode, select the faces, and run "Mesh" > "Normals" > "Flip" in order to fix their orientation.
Why do my bakes have areas that look blurry and show seams?
On dense, smoothly curved surfaces, the automatically created UV map can split an area into many small islands, which bake with blurring and visible seams. Increase the value of the "Angle Limit" option so that fewer islands are created. Note that very high values can stretch the texture on some faces. If the result is still not good enough, you can create your own UV map and use it by enabling the "Use UV Map" option.
Why do my bakes look incorrect when using a custom UV map?
If you are using custom UV maps, please ensure they do not extend beyond Blender's UV boundaries. Any UV island outside of these boundaries will cause visual offsets. Please also make sure that no UV islands overlap.
Why are my baked meshes not included in the exported scene?
In order to ensure correct baking, the baked meshes are disabled in renders by default, and their original counterparts remain enabled. Depending on the export format and its settings, this might exclude baked meshes from the exported scene. To fix this, select all the meshes you would like to export, and use the export setting that allows you to include only the selected meshes. Because some export formats additionally require the selected meshes to be enabled in renders, you might also need to enable the baked meshes manually by going to the "Outliner" and clicking the camera icon next to their names. If you would like to include all baked meshes, you can hold Shift and click the camera icon of the "OpenBake Baked Meshes" collection twice.
- Download the latest OpenBake release
- Open Blender and go to "Edit" > "Preferences" > "Get Extensions"
- Click on the drop-down menu in the upper right corner and choose "Install from Disk..."
- Select the zip file and install OpenBake
- Open a Blender project, switch to the 3D Viewport, and press "N" to open the sidebar
- Locate the "OpenBake" tab and use the add-on