9 Best Material Baking Addons for Blender | Must-Have for Everyone

Today we are going to talk about 9 material baking addons for Blender. These addons have different tools, features, and price ranges. Which will allow you to choose what suits you best. Also, the addons are not arranged in any particular order.

How can these material baking addons for Blender be an asset?

There are many good addons for Blender, making various tasks possible or easier. Blender addons are released on a daily basis which is great! but it is hard to keep up. Therefore, we already listed all the best addons in different categories to help you easily navigate through them:

• Best Blender Addons for Management and Productivity to help you enhance your productivity.
• Addons for Blender with Amazing Assets to help you add add assets like vehicules, buildings, etc.
• Great Blender PBR Addons for Texture Painting to create high-quality materilas and beautiful realistic look for 3D art.
• Great Blender Addon for Concept Art to create 3D concepts art quicker and easier.
• Top Free Addons for Blender as our ultimate list for all different use purposes fully free of cost.

So in this post, we will look at the best 9 material baking addons for Blender.

1. Simplebake

This is a very straightforward baking solution for Blender that is already used by professionals and gaming studios that use Blender. This addon uses nodes to bake simple to complex PBR materials that can be used for different purposes.

The nice thing about it is that it allows you to simplify the process by using a simple and clear interface that has buttons that make things easier. After you are done baking your PBR materials you can export them to software such as substance painter.

Some of the most important features it comes with include the ability of batch baking of multiple textures separately or baking many into just one texture. 

It also can handle UVs in a smart way. You can use existing UVs, generate new UVs and generate atlas maps, either restore your original UV maps after the bake or leave the ones used for baking applied, in addition to many other features.

Simple bake addon can do other stuff such as baking all of the “traditional” Cycles bake modes, along with other kinds of specialist maps (Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, Thickness, Vertex Colours, and Colour ID).

Link: https://blendermarket.com/products/simplebake—simple-pbr-and-other-baking-in-blender-2?ref=247

2. Bake Wrangler

Bake Wrangler add-on is a node-based baking solution for Blender. 

Some of the most important features of this addon worth mentioning:

• It is Node-based: You can create simple or complex baking setups depending on what you need. (Being a node tree they can easily be imported and reused in any project). So if you like node-based setups and workflows this one is for you.
• Bake wrangler support Full background batch baking. You can keep working in Blender while your maps are being generated.
• Pack images how you want, putting data in any channel including Alpha.

It bakes all the maps you need them for “Substance painter”. The node system works just like you would expect and is surprisingly easy to get used to.

Link: https://blendermarket.com/products/bake-wrangler?ref=247

3. BakeTool

BakeTool by Cogumelo Softworks Studio is one of the most well-known baking tools for Blender. This tool is maintained and updated for over 7 years now. It helps you streamline and simplify the process of baking textures. The tool is extremely powerful it allows you to bake multiple passes with one click something that you can’t really do in Blender. Some of its most useful features are but not limited to:

• Multi Job & Multi-Pass: Configure many passes you want, setting objects, devices, sizes, and samples, and bake it all once!
• Chose to weather the baking process is handled by the CPU or GPU for each pass.
• Individual or Atlas Mode: You can bake objects as Individual Textures per pass or Join everything in a single Atlas per pass.
• Non-Blocking Viewport Report, you can keep using Blender while the tool is baking your textures.
• BPR baking: Bake standard PBR maps including channels not available in Blender’s bake system such as Metallic and ID Map.
• Safe & Easy: BakeTool doesn’t mess up your materials, scene, or objects. Just configure it as if for render and Bake!
• Automatic UV Unwrap For Objects and Atlas: You can automatically create and unwrap non overlapped UVs for your objects and for your atlas.
• Finally, Autosaves all your maps externally.

Link: https://blendermarket.com/products/baketool?ref=247

4. JBake

JBake by Jayanam is a simple yet really useful baking addon for Blender to bake your normal maps. It’s clean, intuitive, and does what it is supposed to. It helps you simplify the high to low poly baking workflow with Blender. You just chose your low and high poly mesh chose your normal map resolution and hit bake. Also, the tool is completely free and the next update will include more baking options like curvature.

Jayanam YouTube channel is a great resource for learning Blender. They have a lot of tutorials that range from modeling, texturing, rigging, animation and everything in between. Do check them out if you want to learn more about Blender.

Link: https://github.com/jayanam/jbake-tools

5. Principled-Baker

Next Is Principled-baker by Daniel Enger. Principled Baker is a really powerful Blender baking addon that allows you to bake all your PBR maps in one click. It comes with so many parameters that you can choose from, you can create a different profile to automate the baking process.

Some of the most important features:

• Autodetection of what needs to be baked based on inputs.
• It allows you to bake all Principled BSDF (and more) inputs such as (Color, Metallic, Roughness, Normal, Height…. etc.) to image textures.
• The ability to automatically create new material with new image texture nodes
• Auto UV unwrap option: Smart UV Project/Lightmap Pack
• It has 3 Bake Modes:

1. Combined: to Bake a single selected object or bake multiple selected objects with shared UV maps.
2. Single/Batch: Bake every selected object separately.
3. Selected to Active bake selected object information to the active object

This addon will make your baking workflow way easier On top of all that the addon is completely free.

Link: https://github.com/danielenger/Principled-Baker

6. Bake to vertex color

As we all know vertex color is different from normal texturing in which the color information is stored directly into your mesh data. You don’t need a UV map because the information is attached to mesh data itself. However, if you want to export your color data, you’re going to need to unwrap your mesh and create an image to bake. Not to mention setting up everything to use the default bake in Blender. It’s a slow and cumbersome process, and that’s where vertex color paint comes in.

This awesome Blender addon for texture painting enables you to bake passes like diffuse, emission, ambient occlusion, vertex colors and so on. It will automatically unwrap your model and let you chose the resolution and sample count, smooth vertex colors and assign a name to your vertex color.

This type of workflow can be really useful when working with game assets. By combining this addon with custom shaders in cycles there are endless possibilities for the type of output that you want. 

Link: https://3dbystedt.gumroad.com/l/zdgxg

7. UDIM Baker

UDIM Baker is an extremely useful Blender baking addon to have as a VFX artist and game developer. It allows you to bake all of your UDIM Tiles with one click without going through the headache of baking them all one by one manually and saving them one by one. what UDIM Baker helps you to do is Automate the process by doing all the heavy repetitive labor for you.

On the other hand, if you tried to do it manually for each UDIM tile you’ll have to move your UVs tiles every time you bake, or create separate UV maps for each UDIM tiles. This process is extremely repetitive, the addon will allow you to bypass all the headaches and bake all your maps straight into your UDIM tiles with only one click and save them all to disk automatically.

This tool should be by default in Blender and especially now that the UDIM workflow is an industry-standard for VFX studios, if you’re using UDIM this tool is very useful to have in your arsenal.

Link: https://blendermarket.com/products/udim-baker?ref=247

8. BakeLab2

BakeLab2 is yet another baking addon for Blender. we talked about many Baking tools so far because it’s all about convenience the question is how can you get there as fast as possible with the least effort possible and that’s what all these Addon and tools are all about, streamlining the workflow accelerating and automating the process, and giving you more customization.

BakeLab2 offers a simple and friendly interface and all the features that you would expect from a paid addon.

It’s a lot of features such as: 

• The ability to automatically create images, setup materials, bake objects, and save/pack images in one click.
• Anti-Aliased baking.
• Automatically generating materials.
• Baking cycles displacement to real geometry.
• The ability to Bake any PBR attributes of your material by its name (Metallic, Roughness, Specular and etc.).
• Adaptive image size by object’s surface size.
• At last but not least, Unwrap and Bake Multiple Objects into one image.

Link: https://github.com/Shahzod114/Blender-BakeLab2

9. Eyek

Eyek is one of the best material baking addons for Blender. It works on texturing by projection mapping from multiple images to one UV.

Eyek is an acronym for a simple yet really powerful tool. It allows you to project images and decals from your camera or 3d view to your meshes. This is very useful to add more details to your model like bullet holes cracks logos… etc. if you’re familiar with decale systems in video game production workflow this should be right down your alley.

First, you select your object and then your decal, then you chose a resolution and hit paint. Some of its main features are:

• More versatile than Apply Camera Image.
• The ability to project images on existing UVs.
• Using Image References as decals.
• Alpha channel supported.
• Projecting on multiple objects at once.
• Projections from multiple cameras and empties execute simultaneously.
• Optional shadowing – projections won’t pass through objects.
• Support and constant updates. Community suggested features.

Link: https://phygitalism.gumroad.com/l/eyek_blender_addon