What's Baking?
When exporting your Blender creations to other 3D programs like Unity, Unreal Engine, Godot, etc., procedural materials aren't correctly exported due to their reliance on nodes readable only by Blender. And that's where material baking becomes essential - converting these procedural textures into image textures.
Oven addresses this by offering a complete baking system applicable to any material, regardless of its complexity and without any constraints on specific nodes. Just choose the necessary texture maps, adjust the output image textures resolution and settings, and click "Bake" for a seamless conversion.
Source to Target
Here's a fun challenge for you!
Can you guess how many faces these objects have?
Hover your mouse over the blurred text to reveal the answer!
12.6K
34
But how is that possible, you may ask? Let me introduce you to Source to Target baking. This process involves transferring detailed information, such as textures, normal maps, or ambient occlusion, from a high-resolution model (source) to a lower-resolution model (target). This technique optimizes the performance of 3D models by preserving visual details while reducing polygon count. It's especially useful for large scenes and game engines.
Node Baking
Oven lets you bake the output of any shader node to an image texture, making it extremely useful for complex node setups that become performance-intensive or when certain nodes don't work in Eevee. Unlike other add-ons, Oven works even inside node groups. Additionally, it offers the option to automatically replace the selected socket after baking, connecting the newly created image texture to whatever the socket was originally linked to.
Why Choose Oven?
Oven is hands down the most affordable baking baking add-on out there. It gives you incredible value without sacrificing quality. The interface is super clean and easy to use, so there’s no learning curve to it. Even though it's simple to operate, Oven packs a punch with its customization options, letting you tweak every part of your baking process just the way you like it.
🎨 Customization
Oven lets you customize every aspect of your baking process. You can select all objects you need to be baked at once, choose how Oven selects the correct UV map for each object or create new ones using Smart UV Project. You can also set the exported images' prefix, resolution, and file extension. Additionally, you have full control over the number of baking samples, baking margin, Cycles bake light influence, normal type (DirectX/OpenGL), and much more.
✅ Shader Support
Other baking addons, including the most popular one on BlenderMarket, still lack the ability to bake materials with shader nodes other than Principled BSDF. However, Oven stands out by accurately baking materials with any shader nodes, ensuring that what you see is exactly what you get (or bake...)
🪟 UDIMs
Unlike most baking addons, Oven can bake to UDIMs. UDIMs are a type of UV map that enables textures to be distributed across multiple UV tiles, allowing for higher resolution textures and more detailed models. This method involves creating several small image tiles that are combined to form a high-resolution texture, enhancing detail without compromising performance.
📦 Channel Packing
Oven also excels in channel packing, a technique where multiple textures (such as roughness, metallic, and ambient occlusion) are combined into separate channels of a single texture map. This process optimizes memory usage and improves rendering efficiency by reducing the number of texture samples needed during rendering.
🖌️ Baking to Vertex Colors
Oven stands out with its ability to output bakes not only as image textures but also as vertex colors (color attributes). This feature unlocks endless possibilities, especially with node baking, where you can convert a node to a color attribute with a single click. Only 1 other addon on Blender Market offers this capability, and it comes at a much higher price than Oven.
🔨 Auto-Material Fixing
Imagine having to fix objects with no UV maps, missing materials, or empty material slots. It only gets worse when you have overly nested node groups or Mix Shader nodes that have LITERALLY nothing to mix with. And then there are Material Output nodes buried inside node groups, or materials that don't even have shader nodes at all! Oven takes care of all these frustrating issues automatically for you, so you don't have to stress about it anymore.
