Auto-Bake Tools

Auto-bake Tools

Blender Add-on for Automatic Bevel Shader - Normal Map Baking / AO Baking
easy to use
useful for 3D artists

About The Project

An easy to use Blender Add-on that allows you to bake Bevel Shader to the Normal Map, Ambient Occlusion to the AO Map in fully automatic mode.

If You are working in Blender, this will save you a lot of time!
If You're not working in Blender but need to bake your bevels, this will save you even more time!

Built With

Getting Started

Prerequisites

First You need to install Blender (You need the 3,0,1 or newer)

Download the last blender release:

Installation

Buy an addon or download latest release of Auto-bake Tools:

Run Blender
Go to Edit>Preferences Add-ons tab.
At the top right of the Blender Preferences window, push the install... botton.
Find the downloaded zip with Auto-bake Tools in file manager that appeared, select and click Install Add-on.
Next, use the search in the Blender Preferences window (Directly under the Install... button), find the addon by name.
Check the box next to the found Add-on.

Usage

Select an object that need to bake in the scene. (Must be UV unwrapped)

If an object is selected, the Auto-bake Tools Panel will become available.

Go to Auto-bake Tools Panel

Push the Create Bake Environment button

Correct Values:

Image Width - Bake Image width

Image Height - Bake Image height

For Bevel:

Glossy Preview - Sets the glossy shader to visually display Bevel effect
Bevel Samples - Number of rays to trace per bevel shader evaluation.
Bevel Radius - radius of traced bevels (in meters by default)

For AO:

AO Distance - distance of AO tracing
AO Samples - Number of rays to trace per Ambient Occlusion evaluation
AO Exponentiation - Exponentiation value of AO to increase contrast

Push the Bake Normal and Show button for Bevel or Bake AO and Show for AO
Wait... And That's All! You may save the Bake result Normal Map/AO Map in Image Window that appeared

You can look at this gif:

Important additional information:

It is advisable to check if GPU Render is available for Cycles.

If not available, go to Edit>Preferences System tab In it, select the CUDA subtab and uncheck / check the boxes next to your video card name and near the processor name.

After these steps, GPU Compute will be available in most cases (If the hardware is not quite ancient)

GPU Compute for Cycles is extremely important and greatly overclocks the render, please keep in mind!

Explanation of what the addon code does

Create Bake Environment operator:

Shading setup:

Sets the Render Engine to Cycles
Sets the Render Feature Set to Supported
Trying to set the Render Device to GPU
Sets the Bake Multires to False
Sets the Selected to Active to False

Material Setup:

Creates Material (if selected object have not material)
Sets the Use Nodes to True

Shader Editor setup:

Cleares Nodes
Creates, places and conneсts Glossy BSDF, Diffuse BSDF, Material Output, Bevel node, Image Texture node, Ambient Occlusion, Math(Power)

Bake Normal and Show operator:

Creates the Image with custom _n name ending
Runs default blender Bake operator with type Normal

Bake AO and Show operator:

Creates the Image with custom _ao name ending
Runs default blender Bake operator with type DIFFUSE
Opens the window with the Result

Glossy preview, Image Width, Image Height, Bevel Samples, Bevel Radius, AO Distance, AO Samples, AO Exponentiation - custom properties. It's implementation allows you to change the values at any time. The nodes will get them anyway.