Baking (OUTDATED)

(ONLY FOR 1.5.1 AND BELOW)

The final step to making a great preset is making a baked version of it. You may be asking yourself, "What the actual hell is a baked rig?" and let me tell you this, its not a pie of any sort.

What is a Baked Rig?

Well, to put it simply, a baked rig is a version of the rig which has had all of its features "baked", which basically means set in stone. Almost all modifiers are removed in favor of performance, usability, and cleanliness.

"How much performance does it add to the rig?" Well, if your preset isn't very complicated probably not much, however if suddenly you're working with 4-5 rigs and they're all baked, you'll be extremely happy to not have your computer on fire. With a scene set to a max fps of 144 my unbaked preset runs at around 60fps, however, running the same rig but baked runs it at 144+, I'm sure max would be even higher without a limit.

"Oh wow, that's a really big jump, how do I make one myself?" That's what I'll be teaching you today in this tutorial, this is a more complicated process so make sure you read carefully and if you make a mistake, undo it, go back, and re-read the guide.

How to Make a Baked Rig

For this tutorial I'll be using an unbaked version of my rig which I'll bake and bring you guys along.

Step 1: First, select one of the arms and go to the modifiers tab.

Step 2: You'll want to go through and apply and delete certain modifiers, follow the expandable below for this step.

Step 2 Modifiers:

All Solidify modifiers should just be applied.

Reminder, a keybind to apply modifiers is to hover over them and press Ctrl+A

Arms / Legs

Deform = Apply

Bulge = Apply

Twist = Delete / Don't Touch

Squish = Delete / Don't Touch

Smooth Bend = Don't Touch

Sharp Bend = Don't Touch

Body

Chest Lattice = Apply

Chest Lattice 2 / Shape 2 Chest = Apply

Body Deforms = Apply

Body Stretch = Delete / Don't Touch

RoundedBodyTopDeform = Apply

Body Bulge = Apply

Armature = Don't Touch

Head

Head Squish = Delete / Don't Touch

Armature = Don't Touch

I got a shapekey error, what do I do?

It means you need to apply the shape key, follow the guide below.

To apply a shape key, enter the object data tab, scroll down to shape keys and click the drop down arrow on the right. Next click New Shape from Mix.

Make sure that this new shape key is at the very bottom of the list and set to 0, next scroll up and click on Basis or whatever the first shape key is named.

Start clicking the Remove Shape Key button until all shape keys are removed, if you followed this correctly you should be left with a mesh that looks the same as you started.

Step 3: Next you will want to clean up the blender file, you can do this by deleting ALL unneeded meshes from the scene.

Step 3 Meshes:

A good rule is that anything greyed out in the outliner should be safe to delete as long as its part of the Main Mesh collection. For example, all of the "Arm" meshes can be deleted except for the ones you're using, for those just right click on the purple button and delete driver. Example of the meshes I can delete since I'm using a 3PX no fingers rig.

Step 4: Next we will want to bake the eye material as re-loading that may cause intense lag.

• Go to the Shading Tab and click the eyes

• Open the Render Properties tab on the right of your screen.

• Open the Bake tab farther down the menu.

• Configure the baked settings to look like this.

• Add an image texture node, click new, and name it whatever you want.

• Make sure the image node is selected and then click Bake.

• You should now have a baked image texture, if each eye is slightly different you may need to bake it, then copy the settings of one eye over to the other, and then re-bake it to a new image file.

• Make sure you save the image somewhere, if you don't it will be lost.

• To save the image press N (By Default) in the shader editor, go to Node and click Save.

• Afterwards you may delete my eyenode and other nodes, and use the image with a principled BSDF setup.

Conclusion

Congrats, you have now created a baked rig! I recommend saving this as a separate file and not overwriting your original rig just in case, if you would like to add this to an asset pack follow this guide.