Bulk Bake
Bulk bake functions very similarly to the built in blender bake. The bulk bake menu is located in the 'Properties panel' (default shortcut is 'n') in both the 3d view and image viewer. Please make sure the blender file is saved to avoid issues with image save location!
For individual objects where you want to bake the materials off the object into textures:
- Simply select the object (double check the 'Target' in the bulk bake menu is the desired object)
- Ensure you've UV unwrapped the object and has at least one material applied
- Select an output folder (default is the location of the blender file)
- If you want the baked images to be applied as a new material, check the "Apply images as material" box
- Enter an image size as an integer. eg: 1024 (Note, this will be square. Recommend using power of 2 sizes, eg '512' or '1024' or '2048' etc)
- Choose the bake type you need from the panel of check-boxes below the bake button
- Hit the bake button and wait!
For multiple objects where you want to bake several models onto a singular mesh:
- Create a cage object [1] that covers the objects to bake (our source object(s)). For simple models, usually duplicating the destination object, entering edit mode, selecting all and using the shrink/fatten (shortcut Alt+S) to expand the faces until all the objects are covered is sufficient.
- Select all of the objects you want to bake, then using Ctrl+Click select the destination object last. The target should show the destination object name.
- Ensure the destination object is UV unwrapped
- Check the "Use cage (S2A)" checkbox to enable Selected To Active (S2A) mode.
- Use the eyedropper or dropdown menu on the "Cage Obj" field to select your cage object
- Continue with steps 3 onwards from the single object steps above
Bake times will depend on hardware and image size+bake types.
Please note, the blender window on Windows will show as "not responding", this is due to how Windows determines if a program has stopped responding, and is expected behaviour.
[1] A cage object is a way of 'mapping' the faces of, typically, a higher poly source to a lower poly destination. Imagine using the faces of the cage as cameras looking at the source mesh. This allows us to capture an area from our source mesh and map it to the faces of our destination without having the destination necessarily match the location of the source. This is useful for high to low poly as a low poly mesh will lose some shape, so might be smaller or bigger than the high poly mesh in areas. As such, the cage object MUST match the face count of the destination mesh, and must cover the source object(s). Usually simply duplicating and inflating the destination mesh is enough, but sometimes tweaks are needed to make sure all details are properly transferred, most notably this is visible around steps in the mesh.