[BLENDER 2.8] Render map from shader editor

melviso

In 3dsmax, u can right click any node that corresponds to a texture or group of textures e.g composite map or color correction node and render map in the material editor, is this possible in Blender 2.8 or 2.79 in the shader editor in any way? or only the bake option using cycles?

musashidan

If you hover the cursor over the bottom corner of a viewport panel you can shift click to clone a floating window and then change this to the image editor. I'm not sure if you can render the image in the same way as you can in Max, but I'm very new to Blender and still learning.

Also, unrelated but very useful, if you have Node Wrangler addon enabled(which you should) you can ctrl+shift+click any map to render just that in the 3D view. Very handy for isolating maps.

melviso

Thanks. Will look into it. I am feeling though the only way to render out is using bake:
 I also figured I would be using Blender texturing features for my texturing rather than photoshop after seeing this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReVGrqx_c5M

the way to render out the maps from the material output would be to use bake. I intend to try it out.

musashidan

Sorry mate, I think I misread your intention. I thought you just want to view the input map in a render window, but you want to bake the material channels to a map? Is that right?

melviso

Yes. In 3dsmax material editor, I can select any node and right click, select render map and can save it out. Blender seems to require connecting that particular node to a channel and baking it out. I was wondering if u can select any node in the material hierarchy and render out in Blender which is more convenient and faster but I am thinking it is not possible.

musashidan

Are you looking to render the texture to UVs? Or like in Max where you can just render a procedural noise node or whatever?

You can do this in Blender by baking the material/channels to a texture and saving that out, but it has to be to UVs.

musashidan

melviso said:

  I also figured I would be using Blender texturing features for my texturing rather than photoshop after seeing this:

Have you seen this one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUVEzwAgGzo

melviso

I figured that out. Thank you.
I have seen that video. But I think the other one is better from a workflow perspective

gnoop

in Blender you could do as many output nodes as you want and connect any other node directly to output and then switching in between outputs by selecting one.   Bake this output if necessary.

2.8 has a cool feature  of  normalizing/clamping  output to 0-1 . It makes editing node network using HDR values much more easy and  with visual feedback.  I hate how I have to put normalizing  node in Substance Designer each time I try to figure out what's happening while using HDR 32 bit math.

Same with ShaderFX.  So much prefer Blender nodes since I often couldn't figure out what I am doing in shaderFX  and it was once easiest an simplest shader node editor before AD bought it

As always Blender seems like codded by sane people and not crazy scientists

melviso

Right on, @gnoop.
Will definitely give that a go. For some reason, Cycles bake takes too long though.I reduced the render samples to like :

render to like 4 instead of 32 for the bake.

Is that going to affect quality and it was really fast. Why can't be bake with eevee? Are there plans to add a bake feature to eevee?

gnoop

 I don't bake or render in general with Cycles.    I use Octane for Blender 2.79. A special branch of Blender with Octane integrated.   Octane bakes just in real time although does inferior rounded edges and only world space normals

 I think 128 samples is for clean noiseless AO and would take quite some time in Cycles,  GPU or not. Especially considering you have to bake in double resolution at least to fake AA .  For normal/color/roughness it could be just 4 or 16 I guess.   I recall somebody suggested to increase tiles size for GPU version but honestly don't see any difference now.  

In our custom engine too perfect normal maps with too smooth gradients sometimes gives kind of stepped shading due to severe normal map compression and a bit of noisy ones just doesn't compress so heavily.

musashidan

Yes, lowering the samples to 4 will certainly lower the quality. You're essentially ray-trace rendering when you bake with cycles so all offline rendering settings apply as usual. For instance, I will bake normal maps with 128-200 samples. Obviously map size affects render times in the same way that render size matters when doing regular rendering. You can still tweak settings and turn off or lower the usual bells and whistles when doing ray-trace rendering.

what GPU have you got? This can have a big impact. Do some tests and see with is faster by switching between CPU/GPU

Lower your bounces. Default is 12. Put it down to 3 and disable the others if you're not rendering those effects.

Tile(bucket) size matters, and particularly between GPU/CPU. Optimal sizes are 16x16 for CPU and 256x256 for GPU

melviso

@musashidan
GTX780m. I know, the card is old. Getting a desktop soon with updated hardware. Had issues with the gpu some time back. I use the CPU sometimes tbh.
@gnoop
Does octane render with the GPU or CPU?
EDIT: Its gpu. 

melviso

melviso said:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ReVGrqx_c5M

Just figured u could create this same system with photoshop tbh. Using folders and colored layers very easily.

musashidan

Yes, but in Blender you can paint across full PBR materials just like in S Painter.

melviso

musashidan said:

Yes, but in Blender you can paint across full PBR materials just like in S Painter.

Very true, mate.