Reply To: Baking with displacement? With no UVs?

[Martin Bergwerf]

Hi Nathi,

Good questions!

Simple answer is, that you’ll probably need a UV Map, because you’ll Bake to an Image Texture, that is 2 dimensional.

You can also Bake some things to Vertex Colors……but,

Let’s get to know our trusted default Cube:

It has 8 Vertices, 12 Edges, 6 Faces and each Face has 4 corners, making a total of 24 Face Corners. Each Face Corner has a Number (Index) assigned to it, starting with 0.

When you Unwrap the Cube (or any Mesh Object), each Face Corner gets a position on a 2D grid, going from 0 to 1, but because each Face Corner has an Index, even without a UV Map, they are uniquely identifiable…something like this is happening:

So you can assign a Color to each Face Corner (the default Vertex Color Attribute uses Face Corners), without a UV Map.

But still, for Displacement and  most other Bakes, you’ll want a UV Map for the Object you want to Bake to.

I hope this makes at least a bit of sense.