PanoramaTexture Baking

If you want to use a 3D model as „Dollhouse“ or something similar, you have to bake the panorama-texture.

This is done in two steps:

1. UV unwrapping
2. Texture baking

---

1. UV unwrapping

UV unwrapping means to cut of the 3D model to make it plane. So you can place all the faces on a 2D space.

Blender has many tools to create the UV’s and also many options to do it automaticly.
There are tons of good tutorials in the internet to search for!

The aim for good result is:

• Less or no stretching.
• Best use of texture space.

Creating the UV’s manually has another pro: You have the full control about the layout, which is very helpfull to keep an overwiew.

Tip: You can export the UV-layout, too. This is very helpfull if you want to refine your textures in an image editing application later on.

Screencast

I have made a screencast, while creating the UV’s. In this example, I have added a „checker-texture“ to control the stretching. Every quad has to be a square and each square should have the same size, otherwise the texture will be distorted!

---

2. Texture baking

Texture baking means to transform the panorama to the new UV layout.

The setup for the baking process is done very quickly:

• Switch to cycles renderer.
• Open the PanoMAT in the shader-editor.
• Add a new image-texture node and create a new image.
• Keep sure the new image-texture node is selected.
• Choose „Emit“ in the bake options and press bake.

The baked texture will not be saved within the blend-file. So don’t forget to save it seperatly!

Tip: Go to the render settings and set the render-samples to 1. This will reduce the baketime.

It is also poossible, to render multiple PanoramaTextures at once!
See my other tutorial.

---