How to bake textures in Blender: setup, every map type and common errors

Baking turns what Cycles computes on a surface (a color, a roughness value, a normal, shadows) into an image laid out along the model's UVs. Menus and settings below match Blender 5.x, checked against the 5.2 manual.

What texture baking is for

The Blender manual lists three common uses: baking base color or normal maps to export to game engines, baking ambient occlusion or procedural textures as a base for texture painting, and creating light maps for games. It also suggests baking expensive lighting, such as ambient occlusion or soft shadows from area lights, so the final render does not compute it again. And a procedural material, once baked, becomes plain image files that other software can read, for example in a glTF or FBX export.

How to bake a texture in Blender, step by step

1. In Render Properties, set Render Engine to Cycles: the Bake panel only exists there. If your graphics card is enabled in Edit > Preferences > System, set Device to GPU Compute, since bakes run on the same device as renders.
2. Make sure the object has a UV map whose faces do not overlap: overlapping faces write into the same pixels. In the UV Editor, Select > Select All by Trait > Overlap finds them (Select > Select Overlap in Blender 5.0 and 5.1). Unwrapping is covered step by step in our UV unwrapping guide, and applying the image in the guide to textures in Blender.
3. In the Shader Editor, press Shift+A, then Texture, Image Texture. Click New in the node, name the image after the map and set Width and Height.
4. Leave the node unconnected and click it so it is selected and active. The manual is explicit: the active, selected Image Texture node is the bake target, and a material without one is not baked.
5. In Render Properties, open the Bake panel, choose a Bake Type and click Bake.
6. Open an Image Editor, pick the image from the browse menu and save it with Image > Save As.

To keep detail consistent from one model to the next, see the guide to texel density. Bakes also write into UDIM images, every tile in a single bake; the UDIM guide shows how to create the tiles.

Bake types: which one for which map

Bake Type offers Combined, Ambient Occlusion, Shadow, Position, Normal, UV, Roughness, Emission, Environment, Diffuse, Glossy and Transmission. The ones you will use most:

• Diffuse: under Influence, Contributions offers Direct, Indirect and Color. Keep only Color to get the surface color without lighting, the usual way to bake a base color map. The manual describes that result as independent of sampling. Direct and Indirect without Color give the lighting in grayscale.
• Roughness: the material's roughness, as a grayscale map.
• Normal: Space is Tangent by default, the right choice in most cases according to the manual, because the map then works on animated objects. Blender bakes with the OpenGL convention, green channel pointing up; for a target that expects DirectX, set Swizzle G to -Y. The normal map guide goes into detail.
• Ambient Occlusion: occlusion as set in the World panels. It ignores every light in the scene.
• Emission (Emit in the manual and before Blender 5.0): the material's emission, or glow color.
• Combined: the shaded result, lighting included. Lighting (Direct, Indirect) and Contributions (Diffuse, Glossy, Transmission, Emission) choose what goes in.

Bake every map of a procedural material

One image holds one map, so a procedural material takes one bake per map:

1. Add one Image Texture node per map, each with its own new image: Color, Roughness, Normal.
2. On the Roughness and Normal nodes, set Color Space to Non-Color. The manual requires it for a normal map to give correct results.
3. Click the Color node, bake Diffuse with only Color, save.
4. Click the Roughness node, bake Roughness, save. Then the Normal node: bake Normal, save.

A Normal bake does not need a high poly model: with Selected to Active off, Cycles records the normals coming out of the material's shaders, so procedural bump ends up in the map.

With several material slots, each material needs its own selected Image Texture node pointing to the same image. When you bake several objects one after another into one image, turn off Clear Image in the Output panel, or each bake clears the image before writing.

Selected to Active: high poly onto low poly

Selected to Active bakes the surface of the selected objects onto the active object. It is how the detail of a sculpt reaches a low poly model.

1. Place the high poly and the low poly at the same spot, so they overlap.
2. Give the low poly UVs and the selected, unconnected target node. The high poly needs neither.
3. Click the high poly, then Shift+click the low poly: the last object selected is the active one.
4. In the Bake panel, enable Selected to Active and click Bake.

Rays start from the low poly and travel inward. Where the high poly sticks out, raise Extrusion, which inflates the low poly for the bake. Max Ray Distance limits how far rays search; 0 means no limit. For finer control, enable Cage and pick a Cage Object: an inflated copy of the low poly with the same topology. Without a cage, rays follow the mesh normals, which can cause glitches along edges.

Each object you bake from takes a fixed amount of memory, so the manual suggests joining the high poly pieces first. If the detail lives in a Multiresolution modifier, Bake from Multires bakes normals or displacement straight from its levels.

Margin: keep seams from showing

Blender adds a margin around each UV island by default, to avoid discontinuities at seams caused by texture filtering and mipmapping. The Margin subpanel, under Output, sets its Size in pixels and, except for tangent-space Normal and UV bakes, its Type: Extend stretches the border pixels outward, Adjacent Faces copies pixels from the faces across the seam. Leave room for it when you unwrap.

Save the baked image: Blender will not do it for you

After a bake, Blender reports Baking map saved to internal image, save it externally or pack it. Close Blender without doing either and the bake is gone. In an Image Editor, Image > Save As (Shift+Alt+S) writes a file and Image > Pack stores it in the .blend. Note that File > External Data > Pack Resources only packs images that come from files, not a fresh bake.

Common baking errors

• No active image found, add a material or bake to an external file: the object has no material.
• No active and selected image texture node found in material: Blender skipped that material. Click its target node and bake again.
• Circular dependency for image: the target node is wired into the shader. Disconnect it.
• No active UV layer found in the object: unwrap the model first.
• Black image: new images are black, so nothing was written; check the selected node in every material. A lighting bake also stays dark if no light reaches the object. And at Metallic 1.0 the Principled BSDF has no diffuse reflection: set Metallic to 0 for the Diffuse Color bake, then restore it.
• Normal map wrong once applied: its Image Texture node reads it as sRGB. Set Color Space to Non-Color.
• Object not enabled for rendering: tick Renders in Object Properties > Visibility.

How to bake faster

Cycles bakes with the render settings (samples, bounces and the rest), so the same levers apply.

• Fewer samples for data maps. Diffuse Color, Roughness, Normal and Emission carry no lighting, so a low sample count is usually enough. Lighting bakes (Combined, Ambient Occlusion, Shadow) need real samples.
• The GPU. Bakes use the Device set in Render Properties; the guide to OptiX vs CUDA helps you pick the backend.
• Denoise. The Denoise option under Sampling > Render applies to Combined and Shadow bakes. The Cycles source does not denoise the other types, so an Ambient Occlusion bake gets clean through samples alone.

The guide on how to render faster in Cycles details the sampling and bounce settings that renders and bakes share.