Got a detailed sculpt or procedural material that you need as game/real-time textures?
The Workflow
- Duplicate your high mesh and keep modifiers/procedurals on it.
- Create a low mesh (retopo or decimated + cleaned) and UV unwrap it.
- Go to Render Properties > Bake:
- Bake Type: Normal (Tangent)
- Enable Selected to Active
- Set Ray Distance / Cage (use a cage if possible)
- Bake in this order (typical):
- Normal
- AO
- Curvature (via shader/Geo Nodes if you use one, then bake)
- Roughness / Metallic / Base Color (bake each as needed)
- Save maps with consistent naming:
asset_normal,asset_ao,asset_rough, etc. - Rebuild a lightweight PBR material on the low mesh using the baked textures.
The Usage
This turns a “beautiful-but-heavy” sculpt/procedural setup into a portable, real-time-friendly texture set fast—ideal for game assets, kitbashing libraries, and anything you need to reuse across projects.