Texture Baking in Blender Cycles: Step-by-Step from UVs to Normal Maps

What will you learn in this guide?

Texture baking transfers specific surface, material, or lighting information calculated in a scene to an image texture. In Blender’s Cycles engine, you can use this method to export base color or normal maps; ambient occlusion (AO) and procedural textures can be saved as images for painting or further editing. Light maps can also provide global illumination in games or help speed up rendering.

This guide explains how to prepare a mesh for baking, set an output target, and choose a bake type suited to your needs. It also walks through the essential checks for normal maps, Selected to Active baking, and margins around UV islands. The goal isn’t to use every option in a single output, but to build a simple, verifiable workflow based on the information you need to transfer.

Requirements

The object to be baked must be a mesh and have a UV map. If you’re baking to an image, the material must contain an Image Texture node with an image to use as the bake target. The active and selected image node is used as the target; if a material doesn’t have such a node, no image bake is performed for that material.

Blender’s current documentation also lists an active Color Attribute layer as an output target, in addition to an image. This method requires the active object to be a mesh. Check the available options and interface labels in the version of Blender you’re using; the source materials don’t specify a particular version or hardware requirement.

Cycles baking uses render settings. Values such as sampling and light bounces can affect the quality of the bake, so don’t treat it as an export step independent of render settings. Before you start, make sure the target image and the image node you’ll use are correct.

Step-by-step texture baking

1. Prepare the mesh and UV map. Identify the mesh to bake and confirm that it has a UV map. UV coordinates define which parts of the surface correspond to pixels in the image. Without a UV map, Blender can’t determine how to place surface data in the image. Reviewing the UV island layout and the surfaces to be baked before you start makes it easier to check the result.

2. Set the bake target. If you’re using an image, assign one to an Image Texture node in the material and make that node active as the target. If you have multiple materials, check that the correct image node is active in each relevant material. If you’re using a Color Attribute instead of an image, make sure the target layer on the active mesh is active.

3. Choose what to transfer and select a bake type. Blender’s documentation places the bake controls in the Render > Bake panel. The Normal type transfers surface directions to an RGB image; Emit bakes the material’s emission color, while Shadow bakes shadow and lighting information. AO uses the ambient occlusion defined in the World settings and doesn’t take scene lights into account. Choose a bake type based on how you plan to use the map.

4. Configure the components of a Combined output. Use the Combined type when you need to bring together information from multiple materials, textures, and lighting in a single output. It combines relevant information except specularity; you can select which contributions to include individually. Disable components you don’t need to keep the target map suited to its purpose. For Diffuse, Glossy, and Transmission passes, you can select direct or indirect contributions as well as color. Selecting only contributions produces a grayscale result; selecting both color and contributions produces a color result.

5. Match the normal map settings. The space used for the normal bake must match the space set in the material’s Normal Map node. Blender’s documentation describes tangent space as the default and an appropriate choice in most cases. The UV map of the Image Texture connected to the Normal Map node must also match the UVs used to map the texture. When using the image in this node, set the Image Texture node’s color space to Non-Color so that its RGB values are interpreted as normal map data rather than color.

6. Use Selected to Active when transferring from a high-resolution model. This method bakes surface information from selected objects to the active object. Rays are cast from the low-resolution object toward the high-resolution object. If the high-resolution surface doesn’t fit entirely within the bounds of the low-resolution object, adjust the ray start distance using Max Ray Distance or, depending on whether you use a cage, Cage Extrusion. For more control, you can use a Cage Object. Before you begin, check which situations support the cage and distance settings.

7. Set a margin around UV edges. Margin expands pixels around UV islands outward or fills seams with pixels from neighboring faces; it doesn’t create an empty area. This edge padding can help reduce breaks at UV seams during texture filtering and mip-mapping. The Extend method expands border pixels outward; Adjacent Faces uses neighboring faces on the other side of a seam. Choose the appropriate method and size in pixels. You can use the Clear Image option if the image needs to be cleared before baking.

8. Start the bake and inspect the output. Once you’ve configured the settings, run the Bake operation. Don’t assess the result by its overall appearance alone: check whether surface directions have been transferred as expected in the Normal output, ambient occlusion in AO, and lighting information in a light map. If no data was written to the image, check the UV map and the active image nodes in the relevant materials. Also confirm that the correct layer is active when using a Color Attribute target.

Common issues

If you see lines along UV island edges, first review the margin method and size. If the target image is blank, check that the mesh has a UV map and that the correct Image Texture node is active in each material. If a normal map produces unexpected results on the surface, compare the space settings for the bake and the Normal Map node; make sure they use the same UV map and that the image node’s color space is set to Non-Color.

If you encounter edge issues with Selected to Active, check how the rays interact with the surface and review the cage settings. Without a cage, rays follow the mesh normals; Blender’s documentation notes that this method can cause artifacts at edges. Memory usage also needs to be considered when using multiple high-resolution source objects. Blender’s documentation lists joining bake sources as one way to help prevent issues caused by insufficient memory.

Next steps

For your first test, use a single mesh, a single target, and a bake type suited to your needs. This makes it easier to assess how the settings affect the result. Then try other bake types as needed and check the map in the material or application where it will be used. If you’re exporting to a game engine or other software, make sure the normal space and UV mapping are compatible with that workflow. Refer to the documentation for the version of Blender you’re using for interface options and target types.

Source and license

This guide is adapted from Blender’s Cycles Render Baking and Normal Map documentation. The source materials are licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; the content has been translated into Turkish and reorganized.