High-Low Poly PBR Baker

One of the most annoying things in Blender is baking PBR materials.

Why? Because of how the Principled BSDF shader handles lighting under the hood. I will give you the secret of how this addon works here (it's not really a secret, it's just the information is scattered and sometimes hard to find). You can either do the steps manually yourself, or you can use the addon, which gives you a 1-click solution.

Here's how you can do it manually:

1. Make sure you know how to use the Selected to Active feature, with Extrusion
2. When baking Diffuse, ensure that only the Color pass is active (Direct/Indirect must be off). Also, the metallic value must be set to zero - this influences the diffuse pass!
3. When baking Metallic, you'll notice there is no channel to bake it natively. Re-route the metallic texture to the Emission and then bake that
4. Normal and Roughness bake pretty well

The extrusion should always have some value slightly greater than zero when baking from high poly onto low poly. Getting the order correct in "Selected to Active" matters. Between each pass, you need to re-wire everything properly to get the images to bake properly.

And of course you need to do all of the manual steps: set up a material, set up all the images, connect the nodes...

Ultimately, we want to do something very simple: Bake High Poly to Low Poly

This is a great type of optimization that is often overlooked.

How to Use the Addon

1. It's an N-panel addon, so install as normal

2. Set the Base Name (optional), Resolution (2k and higher will be slow!). The Margin and Extrusion defaults are good enough to get you started

3. In the Scene Tree, hold Control and click the High Poly then the Low Poly:

4. Click Bake ALL Maps, then you're done!

Tri count: 1200

Texture size: 1k

Test it Yourself Sample File

There are two sample files provided with the addon:

Sample Bake Complete - this has the high and low poly Chest model with the baking complete

Sample Test it Yourself - follow the above steps and use the addon to Bake High to Low Poly

Reference model attribution: https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/wood-chest-photoscan-pbr-114d3c43e9b64f2bafb410c...