How to Bake Textures from One UV Map to Another in Blender (Tutorial)

in this tutorial I will show you how to bake textures from one UV map to a different UV map in blender and if you'd like to learn the basics of texture baking and blender then definitely check out my texture baking for beginners tutorial and also my texture baking playlist where I have more texture baking tutorials so first why might you want to bake textures from one UV map to a different UV map well I have this Cube here and I've added this wood material on it and this is the wood zero two six from ambientcg.com it's a free Texture but then I want to make this material look different I wanted to make it look like kind of a shiny polished wood and I also wanted to give it kind of like that red painted finish so to do that I added a noise texture with the color ramp and I added that into the color with a mix RGB node and then I also added these RGB curves and some other color nodes to make the color look different but let's say I wanted to use this model in a game engine or another 3D software or upload it to sketchfab if I wanted to do that then I couldn't use these procedural nodes because procedural nodes like the mix RGB the color ramp and the noise texture those nodes only work in blender so in this case I need to bake the material out to new texture Maps so that it looks like how I want the problem though is that I'm already using the UVS of the object to put these wood textures on the object so just to show you I'm going to move my mouse right up here in the corner and I'm going to click and drag and that is going to split the window and then I'm going to click right up here to change the editor type and I'm going to change this to the UV editor and then I will press the Tab Key to go into edit mode so you can see here is the UV of the object so I've kind of moved some of these islands around to move the wood around so that it shows the part of the wood that I want on the object but if I tried to bake this then there would be some problems because there's overlapping UVS and also some of these islands go out of the boundary of the wood texture so what I need to do is create a different UV map and then I need to use this UV map for the wood but I need to bake the new textures to the new UV map so to do this make sure you have the object selected and you're going to click right over here on the object data properties and then you're going to open up the UV Maps so I want to create a new UV map so to do that I'm going to click on this plus icon right here that'll create a new UV map and then to not get confused by the different UV Maps I'm going to double click on this one to rename it and I'm going to rename this UV map bake because this is going to be the new UV map that we're going to bake to and then this UV map right here I can double click on this to rename it and I could just rename it UV map would because this is the UV mapping for the wood now right up here on the UV editor you can click right up here to preview the UV map wood or the UV map bake and you can see they actually are both the same and that's because when you create a new UV map it's going to duplicate the same data from the old UV map so in the UV editor I want to select the UV map bake because this is the one that we want to re-uvian wrap and then make sure you are in edit mode and I'm going to press the a key to select the entire mesh now I'm going to press the U button and that's going to bring up the UV map settings and for an object like this I'm just going to use the smart UV project and then on the island margin here just to give a little space between the islands I'm going to change this to a .005 and then I can click on OK and there we go so it's UV unwrapped it and you can see now there isn't any overlapping islands and also the islands aren't going out of the boundary of the texture so this will be great for texture baking and if you'd like to learn the basics of UV unwrapping in blender then you can check out my UV unwrapping for beginners tutorial the link is in the description so in the Shader editor I need to add a new image to bake2 so I'm going to press shift a let's go to the search and I'm going to search for the image texture and let's just put that right up here and then I can click on the new button to create a new image texture and I can just call this like wood color because I'm going to bake the color map and then on the width and height here I want to use a 4K image texture so I'm going to click and then drag down and then let go and I'm going to use 4096 pixels by 4009 pixels that is standard for a 4K texture so I can now click on OK and then because I am baking the color map I want the color space here to be set to srgb now right now if we tried to bake this it would use this UV map because this is the first UV map it's the one on top so I need to tell this texture to use the other UV map so to do that I can press shift a I can go to the search and I can search for the UV map node and I want to plug the UV into the vector and then if you click here on the drop down I want to select the UV map bake because that is the new UV map that we're baking to and then right over here this one here this is just the texture coordinate with the UVS and so on default it's going to use the wood because that's the one that we're previewing but if you want to confirm that it's going to use the correct one you could take this UV map node and you could press shift d to duplicate it and you could just bring it right over here and then you can take the texture coordinate node and press X to delete it and you could instead take the UV from this UV map node and put that into the mapping or if you're not using the mapping node you would just take the UV and you would put that into the vector of all of the textures and then of course we don't want to use the UV map bake we want to use the UV map wood and so now these original textures are using the UV map wood but then this texture right up here is using the UV map bake and then also I do have a procedural noise texture but the procedural noise texture is using the object coordinates it's not using any UV mapping so we can just ignore the noise texture so now that this is all set up we can just texture bake the image textures like we normally would so first we need to go over some bake settings so I'm going to click right here on the render properties and to do texture baking and blender you need to use the Cycles rendering engine now if you are using blender EV that's fine you just need to switch to Cycles do the baking and then once you're done doing the texture baking you can switch it back to EV now you can also open up the sampling here and blender actually uses the render samples to bake but you actually don't really need any samples because adding more samples isn't going to make the bake nicer so if you open up the render samples right here I can just turn the render samples to one and this way it'll bake really fast but it won't affect the quality of the bake so I can now just close the sampling Tab and then we want to open up the baking tab right here so then right here on the bake type I want to change this and I'm going to change this to diffuse and so this way it's going to bake any color which is going into the Shader and then also I want to turn off the direct and indirect because if these are turned on it'll actually bake the lighting data into the color but I just want to bake the actual color so I just want to bake the data which is going into the base color here so then before you hit the bake button you need to make sure you have the correct object selected and then what's also really important is to make sure you have the image texture selected that you want to bake to and if it's selected that way blender knows that it's going to bake to it and then I can click on the bake button and it shouldn't take very long and it finished so if I press the Tab Key you to go into edit mode you can see here's the UV mapping and if I scroll right over here you can see here's the UV map bake you can see that is correct so now I just need to save the baked image to a texture on my computer so I'll press tab to go back to object node and then you can click here on image and you can click on save as and I'm just going to save this as woodcolor.png and I'll just click on save as so then of course if you have other Maps like roughness maps and normal Maps you would want to do that right now so you'd want to bake those other Maps I'm not going to bake the roughness map and the normal map in this video but if you'd like to learn how to bake those other Maps then again definitely check out my texture baking tutorial playlist so now that the baking is finished we can get rid of these other nodes and we can just plug up the new color map so if you want to make a copy of these you could you could like duplicate them or just put them in a separate material I'm just going to click and drag to box select all these nodes and I can press X to delete them because I don't need them and then I can bring the wood color down here and this is the one that we baked so I can take the color and look put that into the base color now when I do that you can see something is messed up and that is because this object is still using the old UV map so if I click right back over here on the object data properties you can see we have the UV map wood and then also the UV map bake so to use the new UV map you can just click on this button right here the little camera icon and that way it is going to actually preview the UV map bake and then you could leave this old UV map here if you wanted to but I'm actually going to delete it so I can click on the UV map wood this was the original UV map and I can click on the minus button to get rid of it and then again if you had any other image textures like roughness and normal you would just duplicate the image texture and you would select the correct maps and plug them up correctly so I could now use this material in a game engine or another 3D program or sketchfab because it's just using an image texture and it's not using any procedural nodes and again if you'd like to learn more about texture baking and blender then definitely check out my texture baking for beginners tutorial and my texture baking tutorial tutorial playlist here on YouTube but I hope you found this helpful and thank you for watching

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 39,829

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, baking, uv map, textures, Bake UV Map, Bake From One UV Map to Another, Texture Baking, Blender Texture Bake

Id: wsO1eozb1Qk

Length: 9min 5sec (545 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 11 2022