Hi everyone,
I’ve put together a tutorial covering the Bake Shader feature in my ShapeMesh toolset for Maya.
The basic problem this solves is that a lot of realtime assets use procedural shaders, often with colors or other values driven directly by animation controls. That works fine inside Maya, and in some cases even renders correctly in Maya, but it’s much less useful once you need to move the asset into another package like Blender or Houdini.
Bake Shader takes the component color information from a selected shaded mesh and bakes it out into image sequences. Those sequences can then be used downstream in Unity, Unreal, Blender, Houdini, Alembic workflows, or any other context where Maya’s procedural shader network is not portable on its own.
In the tutorial, I use a waterfall asset with a shader driven by animation controls. I start with the basic GUI workflow, then go a little deeper into the underlying ShaderBoy API.
Topics covered include:
• Baking animated procedural shader channels into image sequences
• Exporting shader-driven color data from Maya
• Setting texture resolution, frame range, file extension, and output directory
• Using the Rewire Shaders option
• Accessing the ShaderBoy API directly
• Previewing temporary shader swatches
• Rewiring shader networks to use baked texture sequences
• Cleaning up temporary nodes after baking
• Important caveats
This is mainly intended for cases where you have stylized or procedural Maya assets that need to become portable texture-based assets for another renderer, engine, DCC package, or Alembic-based pipeline.