Blender 4.1 Simplebake v1.1.9 May 2024 Update Download
SimpleBake is the definitive baking solution for Blender. In short, it allows you to simply bake PBR and other textures.
Blender provides a very powerful way to create complex PBR materials by using nodes. However, what should be a simple process of baking and exporting these materials for use with other software or systems (Substance Painter, Second Life, Sketchfab, Unity etc.) is surprisingly difficult.
SimpleBake aims to address this problem. SimpleBake is an addon / tool that provides a one-click solution for simply baking PBR maps from materials created in Blender.
However, SimpleBake isn’t just an add-on for PBR. You can easily bake all of the “traditional” Cycles bake modes, along with other kinds of specialist maps (Ambient Occlusion, Curvature, Thickness, Vertex Colours and Colour ID).
Traditional or “Cycles Baking”
Traditional Baking – Bake any of the “traditional” Cycles bake modes (Combined, Roughness, Normal etc). SimpleBake will handle all the node setup and a tonne of other things that make baking in Blender a pain. As many materials on your object(s) as you want.
Colour Space – Choose your colour space for baked images. Choose whether or not to use this colour space in your exported files.
General (apply to all baking)
Presets – Create and save your own presets and use them across your blend files.
Bake in the background – Queue up a number of different baking tasks to bake in the background while you continue to work in Blender. Each task can be given a name. When it’s finished, import the textures and/or objects into Blender.
Keep doing what you are doing – No new workflow to learn. No special node groups or materials to use. No limitations on the complexity of your materials. Just simple baking based on your existing workflow.
Special Maps – Bake a number of special maps including AO, Curvature, Thickness, Vertex Colours and Colour ID.
Auto export (baked maps) – Automatically export baked maps to external files.
Auto export (mesh) – Automatically export your mesh to external files (FBX or GLTF). The mesh will have materials applied that refer to your exported bake images, making importing it into another application or service easy.
Batch baking and folder organisation – Export your bakes and mesh to custom folders (created where you blend file is saved), and with custom batch names (which are included in the file names). Bake a complex scene in stages with ease, and never accidentally overwrite your baked maps again!
No limits on materials – Your object can have as many different materials as you want. SimpleBake will process them all.
Combine to one texture set – Bake multiple objects to a single texture set in exactly the same way was you bake anything else.
Smart UV handling – Use existing UVs, generate new UVs and generate atlas maps – whatever you need. Either restore your original UV maps after the bake, or leave the ones used for baking applied.
Copy and apply – Option to duplicate your objects and apply the baked textures right in Blender. Textures you have exported will be linked to the external files (see the next point)
External linking – Textures not saved externally will be linked to Blender internal images. Textures saved externally will be linked to the external file. Never again will you close Blender without saving images externally, only to open it later on and find all your bakes were lost.
Easy to use and well documented – SimpleBake is designed with simplicity in mind. It should “just work”. Almost everything has a verbose tooltip. SimpleBake tries to catch every error, and explain to you what you are doing wrong, and how to fix it. Tips are displayed in the interface to avoid common “gotchas”, or where you have selected options that may not work well together (e.g. baking multiple objects to one texture set with their existing UV maps). Also, check out the FAQs on Blender Market for some detailed information about baking and using SimpleBake.
Automatic updates – No need to come back to Blender Market to grab a new version of SimpleBake. When a new version is available, you will recieve a notification on the SimpleBake panel. You can then automatically update via the SimpleBake user preferences. A quick restart of Blender and you are using the latest and greatest SimpleBake.
UDIMs – Blender still doesn’t support baking to UDIMs, but SimpleBake can make this happen! Check out the Limitations section below for more details.
Version 1.1.0 (12 December 2023)
BUGFIX – Cage objects were sometimes ignored for specials bakes when using the auto-match high to low option
Version 1.0.9 (8 December 2023)
Small improvement to colour management settings for Blender 4.X that I noticed while working on a bigger update
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