1. In the Geometry (SOP) network, prepare the meshes you want to use for the bakes. See Mesh types for the types of meshes you can use and Baking best practices for how to prepare them to ensure best results.

2. In the Copernicus (COP) network, create a Bake Setup node. This creates multiple nodes that baking requires.

3. In the three SOP Import COPs (low, high, and cage), set each SOP Path to the respective path of the prepared mesh from the SOP context. The cage mesh is optional.

4. If you use a cage mesh, set Tracing Mode to Cage Mesh in the Bake Geometry Textures COP.

5. Turn on the Bake Geometry Textures COP’s display flag. After a brief wait, the baked maps appear in the viewport. Configure the settings on this node to adjust the bakes.

6. Select which maps to bake with the toggle under the Texture Maps tab in the Bake Geometry Textures COP. Click the output name in the bottom right of the node to select which map displays. The node bakes and displays only maps that are on.

7. To preview the baked maps on your low-res mesh, add a Preview Material COP and do the following:

   1. Connect the low SOP Import COP’s geometry output to the Preview Material COP’s geo input.

   2. Connect any map you want to preview to a corresponding input of the Preview Material COP. Typically the tangent space normal maps can connect to the normal input and other maps can connect to the basecolor input for debugging purposes.

8. To export your selected maps, create a ROP Image Output COP and do the following:

   1. Connect the Bake Geometry Textures COP’s All Outputs Port (upper-right block) to the ROP Image Output COP’s input.

   2. Click Add AOVs from Input in the File Layout tab of the ROP Image Output COP. This autofills the maps you have on in the Bake Geometry Textures COP.

   3. Add <LAYER> (exactly as shown) to part of the file path in the Output File of the ROP Image Output COP. This string is automatically replaced with the name of the map during the export, which lets you export multiple maps at once when you click Render to Disk.

There are three different mesh types that are relevant for the baking process:

• Low-res mesh

• High-res mesh

• Cage mesh

• While the baker can automatically add missing normals to the low-res mesh, it’s best to create your own vertex normals that you intend to carry over to the target renderer or game engine. This is because the output tangent space normal maps are highly dependent on the low-res mesh normals during both baking and rendering. When baked textures are applied to the low-res mesh for rendering, the tangent space normals from the textures transform to world space using interpolated low-res vertex normals. Make sure that the vertex normals you use to transform the texture normals are the same ones you use to initially bake the textures.

• For a similar reason, it’s best to add your own tangents to the low-res mesh before baking so that the tangents used for baking are what you expect. It’s often more lenient than low-res normals because, if using the MikkT tangent space, the tangent calculation is deterministic based on normals and UVs and it’s largely consistent across applications. Use the PolyFrame SOP to create tangents.

• Make sure your low-res normals and tangents are normalized and orthogonal to each other on vertices and points.

• If your mesh will be triangulated when you use it with your renderer or game engine, it’s best to triangulate your mesh before baking. While triangulation doesn’t affect normals and tangents stored on vertices and points, the interpolated normals and tangents across faces depend on how the faces are triangulated. There’s no guarantee that Houdini and your target application will triangulate quads and n-gons in the same pattern, and this inconsistency may result in incorrect tangent space normals within faces (particularly with non-planar faces).

• Make sure your UV layout provides enough texel density and padding between UV islands to avoid sampling artifacts.

• If the low-res mesh has hard edges (smoothing groups), this means the vertex normals on either side of a hard edge are not continuous. In this case, make sure there are UV seams along these hard edges. Otherwise, in the texture space, the hard edges can run across the center of many texels and cause sub-texel tracing direction inconsistency that results in artifacts in the final bakes. Having UV seams and sufficient padding between UV islands pushes apart two sides of the edges that have discontinuous normals, which eliminates these artifacts.

• If the low-res mesh has many movable components (such as parts that can be animated, attached, or detached), you should typically bake these components independently so that they don’t cast undesirable shadows or appear to be welded to other parts. To bake components independently, add a piece attribute to your low-res, high-res, and cage meshes. Assign unique values per component so that the same component shares the same value across the low-res, high-res, and cage meshes. Turn on Match Pieces by Name in the Bake Geometry Textures COP and set the Piece Attribute.

• If your mesh is complex and has many different types of features, consider using a custom cage mesh to improve the bake results. See cage mesh for more information.