Packing Black and White texture maps into one RGBA image?

globglob

I'm trying to optimize my models for opengl visualisation and one of the thing you can do is having one texture that carry all your black and white maps (AO, metallic, roughness...). Once I've baked all my maps separately, what's the best way to combine them into one texture like that? Should I do it in Blender (my main 3D program, in which I do the baking) or in Photoshop? What's the workflow?

In the end I want to be able to do something like this with my final texture: https://pasteboard.co/IqKKZUY.png

Thanks!

PS: I also have substance painter that I can use for baking if necessary but I usually prefer to use Blender since I can tweak cages and such directly in the software.

zachagreg

If you're doing your baking in Blender there is a combine RGBA node which you can plug in your bake results to.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/dev/compositing/types/converter/combine_separate.html

If you want to do it in Photoshop you can do that too by bringing in your masks into a Photoshop file, opening a separate file and copying a mask, going to your other merge file and selecting a channel and pasting. You'll start to see the rainbow merge texture being generated in the RGB channel.

Eric Chadwick

If you're using glTF format, the BabylonJS exporter for Blender should allow you to do this automatically on export.