The Bakery: Inside Mari’s texture-baking engine

Texture baking is an essential part of an artist’s workflow, enabling you to transfer detail from a high-resolution object to a texture map that can be used at a lower resolution.

Until the launch of Mari 7.0, you would have needed to leave the application to do most of your 3D model baking — but that all changed with the introduction of the Bakery.

Bake maps rendered from the Bakery in Mari

What is the Bakery in Mari?

The Bakery is Mari’s mesh map baker, taking geometry-based information from one mesh and baking it down into a texture that you can apply to that same mesh, or a different one.

With this powerful map-baking engine, you can create geometry maps, including curvatures and ambient occlusions, without needing a separate application or plugin. With the ability to quickly bake maps for multiple objects at once across multiple UDIMs, there’s no need to disrupt your artistic flow — and no need to leave Mari.

Different types of Bake Maps in the Bakery in Mari

“It's as simple as picking which recipe you want to bake and fine-tuning key properties like offset and distance to your liking,” says Charli Holt, Mari Product Manager.

Benefits of the Bakery in Mari

The introduction of the Bakery means that artists can work faster and more efficiently. As you no longer have to waste time going out of the software to bake in other applications before returning to finish off the asset in Mari, you have more time to concentrate on your artistry.

Charli explains: “With Mari’s Bakery it takes virtually no time to bake your 3D geometry into 2D texture maps, and you can even batch bake recipes all in one go, streamlining your texturing processes in the long run without sacrificing the resolution you would in other software.

“This means artists like you can focus on creativity, while Mari handles the baking, converting and exporting for you.”

Bake in high resolution

With the Bakery, you can bake multiple objects at once, even on projects with hundreds of UDIMs, with ease and speed, meaning less time waiting and more time painting. Thanks to its ability to bake more UDIMs than you could possibly need, the Bakery is ideal for both hero and background assets.

All the recipes have parameters you can use to customize the texture maps to
your taste, and you can even create your own custom recipes from scratch. Mari also cuts out the guesswork with a preview window, so you can check how your map looks and get instant visual feedback as you adjust parameters. You can then export the baked maps to disk or directly to your project as paint nodes, geo channels or channel nodes. Then, just go ahead and bake!