Character artist Daniel Bystedt has released Bystedt’s Blender Baker, a neat free add-on intended to streamline the process of baking PBR texture maps and lighting inside Blender.

The add-on provides workflow features not present in the open-source software itself, making it quicker to bake data from source high-resolution models for use on low-res versions in games and real-time work.

Bake and preview geometry, shading and lighting data more quickly inside Blender
Bystedt’s Blender Baker – strictly, it’s written without the apostrophe, but the grammar pedant in me rebels at that – enables users to bake custom sets of texture maps from models inside Blender.

That includes standard geometry-based maps like normal, displacement and ambient occlusion, and standard PBR texture maps, including Metallic, Roughness and Glossy.

More unusual options include Channel Transfer, which makes it possible to combine individual RGB colour channels from different map types into a single packed texture.

The add-on automatically matches a source high-poly model and target low-poly model based on their bounding boxes; and separates parts of the source model to avoid intersection issues.

Each pass can be previewed on the 3D model inside Blender before baking; and it is possible to apply anti-aliasing and sub-pixel sampling as a post-process to improve the quality of the maps generated.

You can see the complete workflow in this walkthrough video.

The first add-on from one of the Blender community’s best-known artists
Although well known within the Blender community for his art work, Bystedt’s Blender Baker is Daniel Bystedt’s first public foray into tools development.

Formerly head of modeling at VFX house Goodbye Kansas Studios and now senior character artist at game developer Embark Studios, Bystedt was one of the highest-profile artists to embrace Blender prior to its milestone 2.80 release, generating some of the most eye-catching visuals for its then-new Eevee renderer.

Pricing and system requirements
Bystedt’s Blender Baker is available for the current release of Blender. It’s a free download.

Download Bystedt’s Blender Baker from Daniel Bystedt’s Gumroad store
(Add a voluntary donation, or enter a figure of $0 to get it for free)

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