Baking a scene
Process
1 Create the scene, keep amount of vertices and complexity in mind
2 Optimize by removing all faces that will be out of view
3 Fix any incorrect face orientation
4 Check 'Face orientation' in the viewport overlay menu
- This makes everything blue or red depending on the direction of the normals
- The outside has to be blue
- Select the red object, go into edit mode, select all vertices that are red
- Use the search (F3) and look for flip
- This flips the normals and make the object blue
5 Normalize scales (make sure all scales are correctly applied)
- Select all objects in the scene
- Ctrl+A to get the 'Apply' context menu
- Choose scale
6 UV Unwrapping
- Open the UV editor in a viewport
- Select an object to unwrap and switch to edit mode
- Select all vertices
- Select 'Live Unwrap' from the viewport options menu
- Select 'U' for the unwrap menu
- U+M is mark a side as seam
- U+C is clear a seam
- Make an unfold that makes sense to represent the whole object nicely flat
- Resize to fit all on the on UV map
7 Bake Image
- In the UV Editor select new image
- Give it a name
- Size 4096x4096
- Color white
- No Alpha
- Generated type Blank
- Check 32-bit float
- Uncheck tiled
8 Save the texture
- Click save as and select same folder as the blend file
- Select file format Radiance HDR
- Color RGB
- Color space Linear
9 Set Bake image on each material
- Open the shader editor
- Go over all objects
- For each material on an object we need to add an Image texture node
- Shift+A - search - image texture
- In the image texture node select the Baked image we created
- Repeat for all materials in use by the objects
10 Baking settings
- In the Render section choose 128 samples (higher is more qualirty but takes longer and more file size)
- In the Bake section select Bake type combined
- Select View from : Active Camera