Bake Materials to UV

A Blender add-on that bakes PBR materials into UE5-ready textures. Produces an optimized texture set with ORM channel packing, matching the standard Substance Painter to Unreal Engine workflow.

Requirements

• Blender 4.0 or later
• Object must have at least one material using the Principled BSDF shader
• Object must have a UV map
• At least one image must exist in the blend file (used to determine bake resolution)

Installation

1. Open Blender and go to Edit > Preferences > Add-ons
2. Click Install... and select bake_materials_to_uv.py
3. Enable the add-on by checking the box next to Bake Materials to UV

Usage

1. Select a mesh object in the 3D Viewport
2. Right-click to open the Object Context Menu
3. Click Bake Materials to UV
4. In the dialog that appears:
   • UV Map — choose which UV map to bake onto
   • Target Image — choose an existing image to determine the bake resolution (e.g., a 1024x1024 image will produce 1024x1024 textures)
5. Click OK to start baking
6. When baking completes, a file browser will open — choose a folder to save the output textures

Notes

• The add-on temporarily switches to Cycles and uses GPU rendering for baking, then restores your original settings
• All materials on the object are baked onto a single UV map (same as Substance Painter export)
• Library-linked materials are temporarily made local for baking, then restored
• The ORM texture packs three grayscale maps into one RGB image, reducing texture memory by 66%
• Metallic and Opacity are baked by routing their values through the Emission channel since Blender has no native bake type for these
• Emissive is baked before Opacity and Metallic to capture the original emission data before any rewiring
• The bake resolution is determined by the image you select in the dialog — it does not modify that image

License

GPL-2.0-or-later