GameMat Baker — Non-Blocking PBR Baking for Game Engines

One-click PBR maps with engine-specific filenames, channel packing, modal queue bake that keeps the UI responsive, and auto-UV.

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Why GameMat Baker

Baking inside Blender is a chore: the UI freezes for minutes, your selection state gets wiped, the channel packer crashes on mismatched resolutions, and you spend the rest of the afternoon renaming files for Unity / Unreal / Godot suffix conventions.

GameMat Baker fixes the workflow end-to-end. A modal-queue bake leaves the UI responsive between maps. Engine-specific naming templates output T_Name_BC.png for Unreal, Name_BaseMap.png for Unity URP, lowercase Name_albedo.png for Godot. Channels are packed per engine (Metallic+Smoothness for Unity URP and HDRP, ORM for Unreal & Godot). State is snapshotted and restored even on errors.

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Features

Non-blocking modal bake

• One-map-per-timer-tick queue: UI refreshes between each map
• ESC cancels cleanly; scene state restored
• Progress reported in the operator info bar
• Sync version stays available as fallback

Engine-specific filename templates

• Unity URP — Mat_BaseMap.png, Mat_Normal.png, Mat_Metallic.png; packed Mat_MetallicSmoothness.png
• Unity HDRP — Mat_BaseColor.png, Mat_MaskMap.png (holds the Metallic map), Mat_NormalOS.png
• Unreal — T_Mat_BC.png, T_Mat_N.png, T_Mat_M.png; packed Mat_ORM.png
• Godot 4 — Mat_albedo.png, Mat_normal.png, Mat_metallic.png; packed Mat_ORM.png
• Generic — plain Mat_albedo.png, Mat_normal.png … (map name in lower case)

Seven PBR map types

Albedo, Normal (tangent-space), Roughness, Metallic, AO, Emission, Opacity. AO is baked with a ray distance of 0.5 and 64 samples.

Channel packing per engine

• Unity URP — Metallic (RGB) + Smoothness (A)
• Unity HDRP — the same Metallic (RGB) + Smoothness (A) pack as URP; a full HDRP Mask Map (Metallic / AO / Detail / Smoothness) is not built
• Unreal / Godot — ORM: AO (R) + Roughness (G) + Metallic (B)
• Mixed-resolution inputs are bilinear-resized to the largest — no more crash on packing a 2K metallic with a 4K roughness

Seamless tiling — properly

Cross-fade edge blend with proper tangent-space renormalization for Normal maps. The seam stays unit-length so the surface doesn't look bumpy.

Auto UV unwrap

If a mesh has no UV layer, the operator runs Smart UV Project automatically instead of erroring out.

Scene-state preservation

Selection, active object, render engine, use_nodes flags — all snapshotted in save_scene_state and restored via finally, even when a bake errors out partway.

GPU device fallback

Cycles GPU is best-effort. If your system can't enable it (Apple Silicon without Metal, CUDA on a CPU-only machine) the addon falls back to CPU and continues without a message.

Resolution presets

256 / 512 / 1024 / 2048 / 4096 / 8192 (8K is RAM-heavy and surfaced as a warning in the UI).

Texel-density auto-resolution

Detect a sensible output size from the mesh's surface-area-to-UV-area ratio. Toggle in settings.

Texel-density map export

One click exports a texel-density heatmap of the object's UVs to a PNG (or TGA / TIFF / EXR). Every face is coloured by its local density — blue where the surface is under-textured, green at the reference density, red where UV space is wasted — so uneven layouts are obvious at a glance and easy to share with your team.

Smart image reuse

Object_Map name collisions don't clobber images referenced elsewhere; we generate a unique name with .001 suffix instead.

Post-bake report

Last-bake summary stored on the scene as gmb_last_report — files written, total count, duration, target engine.

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Compatibility

• Blender: 4.2 LTS and later (tested on 4.2.9 and 5.2.0)
• OS: Windows / macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon) / Linux
• Engines: Unity URP / HDRP, Unreal Engine, Godot 4, Generic

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What you get

• GameMat Baker add-on (Python only, no DLL)
• README with full quick-start guide
• Support through marketplace messaging

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Install

Open Preferences, then Add-ons, press the arrow button in the top right corner, choose Install from Disk, pick the downloaded ZIP, and enable it. The GameMat Baker sidebar tab appears in the 3D Viewport (press N).

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License

GPL-3.0. The textures you bake are yours to ship in any commercial project.

1.1.1 — Exporting the texel density map no longer fails with «Could not write image» when the chosen path is a folder or empty. A folder now receives TD_<object>.png, an empty path is refused with a readable message, and a write error is reported instead of raised.