Baking the procedural materials

[Guillermo Espert]

Hi a general;

Once the procedural shader is dialed in, is there any advantage or disadvantage for baking things like albedo into images so as to simplify the shader calculations? Because we are already using several image textures I was thinking it might make sense to bake base color, normals and roughness. 

As a general rule, why and when would you switch to baking your procedural shaders (besides switching to a different software)?

[Omar Domenech]

The advantage as you say is to simplify the calculations and when exporting to other software’s, so you got that nailed down. The disadvantage is just that you loose the ability to make edits and change stuff and you have to go back if the need to make a change presents itself. You can go ahead and bake things down if you fee like so, but it would be a good idea to keep on going in the course just in case baking things into texture becomes an issue down the road.

[Adrian Bellworthy]

If the model is to stay within Blender to render an image or video animation, then there is no need to bake the procedural shaders.
To bake these down to images, you will also need to UV unwrap the model, extra work that is unnecessary.

If you want to export your model to a game engine for example, you will need to do the extra work. Other software won’t recognise Blender’s shader tree, which is why you need to import baked image textures as well as the model into the game engine.

[Author]

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