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, AO controls 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 correctly per engine (Metallic+Smoothness for URP, MaskMap for HDRP, ORM for Unreal & Godot). State is snapshotted and restored even on errors.

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Features

Non-blocking modal bake (v1.2)

• 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 (v1.1)

• Unity URP — Mat_BaseMap.png, Mat_Normal.png, Mat_MetallicSmoothness.png
• Unity HDRP — Mat_BaseColor.png, Mat_MaskMap.png, Mat_NormalOS.png
• Unreal — T_Mat_BC.png, T_Mat_ORM.png, T_Mat_N.png
• Godot 4 — Mat_albedo.png, Mat_orm.png, Mat_normal.png
• Generic — plain Mat_Map.png

Seven PBR map types

Albedo, Normal (tangent-space), Roughness, Metallic, AO, Emission, Opacity. AO has its own distance + sample controls separate from the main sample count.

Channel packing per engine

• Unity URP — Metallic (RGB) + Smoothness (A)
• Unity HDRP — MaskMap: Metallic / AO / Detail / Smoothness
• 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 can run Smart UV Project automatically instead of erroring out. Toggle in settings.

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.

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 (new)

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: 3.2 + (tested on 3.6 LTS, 4.2 LTS)
• OS: Windows / macOS (Intel + Apple Silicon) / Linux
• Engines: Unity URP / HDRP / Built-in, Unreal Engine 4 / 5, Godot 4

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What you get

• GameMat Baker add-on (Python only, no DLL)
• README with full quick-start guide
• Free updates for v1.x
• Support through marketplace messaging

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Install

Open Preferences, then Add-ons, then 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.