BakeFlow - Blender Addon

Tarmunds - Kostia Perry
Sep 15
4 min read

BakeFlow is a Blender add-on that streamlines the workflow from retopology and UV preparation to baking and Marmoset Toolbag integration.

It combines three modules into one cohesive toolset:

UV Helper – mesh and UV preparation utilities
Baking Supply – naming, visibility, and export management
Marmoset Bridge – one-click handoff to Marmoset Toolbag with map presets

Features Overview

UV Helper

Tools to clean meshes, detect issues, and speed up UV preparation.

Select Edges by Angle – find edges based on normal differences

Help a lot to get a rough selection of the hard edges to setup sharp and seam.

Select Contour Edges – create contour loops from selected faces.

Sometime it's easier to select the face then get the contour, that exactly what this button does. It get the contour edges of your selection.

Tag/Clear Seam & Sharp – quickly assign or remove seams and sharp edges.

A lot of time when you tag seam you want to tag sharp too to minimize or avoid gradient on normal map (don't hesitate to checkout my tutorial for the bake). That's the purpose of this operators, and also to clear both at the same time.

Clear Split Normals – remove custom split normals.

Most of the time when importing a mesh from zbrush it come with custom split normal. If used for the lowpoly it can be annoying ot remove them one by one, that's what this button does for you.

Add Modifiers – add Triangulate and Weighted Normal modifiers in one click.

To make sure the bake goes well (don't hesitate to checkout my tutorial for the bake). It's important to triangulate before baking, and the weighted normal is most of the time useful to get rid of some normal gradient artefacts.

Detect Ngons – locate n-gons (across selected, visible, or all meshes).

This powerful operators help locate Ngon across several meshes. I personally also used it before sending a mesh to zbrush to avoid hole artefacts.

Baking Supply

Automates high/low mesh naming, organization, and export.

Visibility Controls – hide/show all high or low meshes.

Simple button to hdie or show all meshes based on their suffix

Renaming – batch rename with sequential numbering.

Simple batch rename operator with proper enumeration in the end ( _01, _02, ...)

Suffix Management – add _high or _low, swap suffixes, or transfer names.

Add _high or _low : basicly add this suffi to the end of the meshes end

Swap suffix : change _high to _low and the inverse

Transfer name : transfer the name of the active meshes to the rest of the selection with suffix adaptation. Super handy to propagate _high name to their lows or the inverse

Export High/Low – export selected _high or _low meshes with proper naming and folder options.

This export both high or low in the selections to the define path using the "Files Name" for the file naming. For the path option, if let empty it will be exported at the blend file location.

Marmoset Bridge

Direct integration with Marmoset Toolbag for baking.

Export & Launch – send selected meshes to Toolbag and launch with bake setup.

Export and launch the selected meshes to import them directly on marmoset using the properties below.

Bake Properties - all properties send to marmoset for the baker.

Send Properties - Enable the fact that it will push the properties to the baker, disable if you want to use you own marmoset saved preset.
Quick Bake - Enable a direct bake at import
Path - Path of the baked Textures, can be the same as the mesh path (in the export fbx), or a custom one that you set
Samples - number of iteration of the ray traced baking
Pixel Depth - Change the pixel depth (intersting for world space normal for painter or high quality height map)
File Format - Quite explicit :)
Tile Mode - To change from classic baking to per texture set baking (based on the low meshes materials)
Overide Max Offset - Simple way to overide max cage offsett of all bake group
Opengl/DirectX - Change the orientation of the normal map (flip green channel) and change the material preview propertie according to that
Texture resolution: set the texture res, even non square if wanted

Map Settings – per-map controls and enable

Per map setting and enable, possibility to store configuration in presets. Really helpful to have your config and bake in a second with your properties. In the future I might create tools to tailored some of them (for example auto compute height map paramaetters, ...)

Presets – save and reuse common bake setups.

All the maps settings can be saved into presets that you can use as you want. I'll provide with the addon 2 premade presets that are tailored for assets and tileable creation workflow.