Blender Secrets - Baking Bevel and Occlusion maps

If you want to have fine control over edge wear effects that works in both Eevee and Cycles, you should first bake maps that identify edges. This is also how programs like Substance Painter work - there, they call this kind of texture a “mesh map” and you bake them before you can take advantage of real-time “smart” materials and add effects like edge wear. In Blender, we can follow a similar workflow.
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Written by / voice: Jan van den Hemel
Video edited by: Tushar Ganesh

[@boriskourt]

This has always been my favourite technique. Can get really creative by using these as masks and inputs.

[@piorism]

The part about getting the bevel information using a dot product with the normals is extremely useful - thank you for sharing.

[@animgreat2719]

as always, amazong!

[@BlenderSecrets]

Thonks!

[@skypc6578]

nice always like your videos and learn a lot

[@fnafgamer2469]

I’m definitely gonna be using this to make Metallic maps. Thank you so much!

[@nightblade178]

Ambient occlusion can be baked in the settings instead of using nodes

[@BlenderSecrets]

Literally what this video is about ;-)

[@danielf5651]

Awesome as usual

[@orphydiancg7759]

A more lengthy vid on the full process pls?

[@MB-nh9dr]

I’ve always been wondering how to find edges like this! Is the baking required or can you run in real-time nodes? Thanks for the tip!

[@theomiado7954]

Super useful

[@orphydiancg7759]

Do you need to UV unwrap the model first?

[@Velta_Nox]

Obviously, yes. ^^

[@3danimator]

♥️

[@amjadmosawi2923]

how can I bake a texture that is not active on any object , its says no active uv layer )) for that unconnected image texture , what I missed exactly ?

[@BrianLife]

Ok, Im willing to do work and I do appreciate all you share But, I don't like how you have nodes at the end but don't tell what they are. its all so fast. I know its for IG but its get annoying stopping the videos. and then searching to find out what these nodes are when you don't mention the,. Like especially at the end.

[@onjofilms]

You can play it back at a slower speed dumbo.

[@murdocklesban6836]

excuse me yuoru model is unwrap? mine looks dark completely

[@BlenderSecrets]

Yes if you want to bake textures, you'll need to unwrap the model.

[@hasanbasryand6880]

Hi. I'm wondering about such a thing. We can bake and output textures in the shading panel of the blender. For example, I created a lava flow, animation in the shading panel, so how do I output it? Also my main goal is to dump this output into an unreal engine.

[@aristateles1549]

Do I need to do it from high poly to low poly?

[@DaeOh]

yea I don't get this one, like what exactly is the output and how can I use it as a "mask"

[@piorism]

That's the essence of texturing - defining features (edgewear, details, anything really) as BW information that is then used to blend two or more colors or materials. For instance a grunged up version of the edge mask shown in the video allows you to differenciate, say, the paint on the surface of an object from the metal that shows underneathat the location of chipped edges. How to use these masks is up to you (Photoshop, Substance painter, or directly inside blender as the factor in a mixRGB or mixShader node for instance).
As for the output : The blender baker bakes to the currently selected image node, in the currently selected material. So in order to save these masks as texture you have to first create an image node insider the material of the object you are baking information from ("from and to" in this case, as the source and target objects are the same).

[@rhanggaadhiyaksa8307]

do i need to bevel my 3d model first before i can use these edge nodes ??

[@BlenderSecrets]

No

[@evankirsh]

Everything goes fine until I try to bake the bevel map. The end result is just black. Anyone know what I'm doing wrong??

[@BlenderSecrets]

Black result when baking is typically the result of selecting in the wrong order. Are you selecting things in the Outliner or in the 3D viewport?

[@TimParaxade]

Why invert the result of the AO node?

[@BlenderSecrets]

With a mask, you generally want the white part to be the “revealing” part and the black the “hiding” part, if that makes sense. So the crevices are the parts you want to show with the Occlusion mask (for dirt, stuff like that) so that’s the white part of the mask.

[@TimParaxade]

@@BlenderSecrets Ooooh, so it's an Occlusion _mask_ then! Makes sense that way then!

[@pile333]

Nice. Dot product?

[@josteinliesvalheim3271]

It's the vector math node. The math nodes change names based what function they're set to :)

[@pile333]

@@josteinliesvalheim3271 Yes, I know, but I've never had the chance to see that in action so far.

[@piorism]

@@josteinliesvalheim3271 .... and that's a very annoying UX design, by the way :D There are few things worse than a node that cannot be identified by its label. Hopefully this will get changed one day ...

[@AntoSketcher]

[Shift] + [A] > Add > Converter > Vector math

[@Sigmamagic15]

How to quick edit blender krita
file path for linux ? in preference

[@BlenderSecrets]

I’ve never used Linux, so no idea! Maybe you can ask on Blender Stack Exchange?

[@Sigmamagic15]

@@BlenderSecrets THANK YOU FOR REPLY 👍

[@chryssdale5747]

Uv unwrap your model

[@pinyw683]

Useful

[@caribbeanchild]

But the object already has a texture? We just made a mask! Where do you create the new texture? In another slot? I wish the people that make these videos would think a little about people who are actually trying to learn. All you do is create more confusion. We don't need more confusion in Blender. Frustrating.