[TOOL / ADDON] VmBaker - GPU-accelerated texture baker (Maya, Blender & beyond)

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  Noth polycounter lvl 17

  Jun 30 2026

  Cool stuff! what are your plans for it? I usually use Marmoset, it's about as good as it gets for baking. What's your angle? Lower cost, persistent license, workflow improvement, ect
  
  

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  vaclavmazany polycounter lvl 8

  Jun 30 2026

  Thanks! To be totally honest, my plans for it are pretty open ended at this point - at least in the long term.
  
  Since you mentioned Marmoset, I don't really want to compete with standalone tools like that because I often find them quite cumbersome for quick iterative tasks. My main issue with bakers like Marmoset, Substance, or xNormal is that you have to constantly export your meshes and work in a completely different environment. In fact, that's the exact reason why I use UVPackmaster instead of RizomUV, even though I have licenses for both. That was my initial motivation for building VmBaker: I want to keep it strictly as an integrated DCC add-on. It comes with some restrictions, but IMHO it gives you a much faster workflow since you can model, UV unwrap, and bake all in one place without the hassle of exporting.
  
  So to answer your question, my main angle is definitely workflow improvement. My day-to-day work heavily relies on lowpoly models (mostly vehicles and technical stuff) and using edge-bevel baking instead of building highpoly source models. VmBaker streamlines this process massively for me because I can work directly in Maya and iterate piece by piece. Additionally, I found that Blender's native baker (at least when baking normal maps) is quite slow and not as precise as I need it to be, which was the other main motivation for building this.
  
  Regarding cost - yes, I will definitely try to keep the pricing on the lower end. At the end of the day, this tool won't have as many features as those standalone apps. I want to keep it as straightforward as possible, which gets difficult if you bloat it with too many features. I know this won't make me a millionaire anyway, so I'm much happier seeing artists actually use it rather than trying to maximize profit. As for the license, I want to keep it persistent and DRM-free. I'll most likely follow a standard major-version release structure, where big updates will be a new version of the tool.
  
  For my immediate plans: I want to add compatibility with ZenBBQ so VmBaker can read its mesh settings directly and bake them with added precision and speed, but incorporate in in my baker so that it works across all the DCCs. I also want to add more options for baking AO that take normal map textures into account (which I find surprisingly difficult to do without visual artifacts in most existing tools). Beyond that, I want to expand mask baking options (like simpler ID masking or baking from textures) and add a proper preset management system. None of this is set in stone yet, but that gives you a glimpse of what’s coming in the near future. I have quite a list of ideas, but I haven't decided on everything just yet.
  
  Right now, though, my primary focus is just listening to user feedback, fixing any possible bugs, and optimizing the code to make it faster if possible.
  
  Now that I see how long this reply got, I should probably stop typing
  

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  Xoliul polycounter lvl 17

  10:17AM

  Just tried it out, I find it all a bit confusing... Even your docs don't provide much of an oversight into the general workflow, it dives into super specific examples right away.
  My main issue is I can't seem to find where to do the traditional High to Lowpoly baking. How/where do I mark some meshes as low, some as high? Does it do any kind of filtering or matching?
  
  From what i can tell this was more conceived with a lowpoly bevel first idea, but it's not entirely clear to me if that's the case? If so, the radius control is really important, and probably previewing it as well, this doesn't seem to be very easy?

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  vaclavmazany polycounter lvl 8

  10:28AM

  Just to add some context to it when I mention the precision. This is a comparison of VmBaker vs Marmoset vs Blender edge bevel baked into a texture.
  Texture is 1024x1024
  
  Settings are :
  
  * no antialiasing / no SSAA
  * 8 bit normalmap PNG texture
  
  Marmoset
      * 32 baker settings samples
      * 32 bevel samples
      * dithering disabled (to avoid noise)
  
  Blender
      * 128 bevel samples
      * 4096 maximum samples for baker
      * disabled denoiser
  
  VmBaker
      * 32 samples (64 samples gives even cleaner results, but not really noticeable difference)
  
  Just a disclaimer, number of samples can't really be compared as I have no clue how others handle samples, so don't consider to be the number of samples to behave the same in all the softwares.
  

  
  

  This is the test model - I will concentrate on the marked corner on the top as it is most obvious in there.

  
  

  All previews are shown in Blender.

  
  

  Notice the disconnection on the corner. And in my experience this happens on all models.

  Left : shiny material | Right : raw normals

  

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  vaclavmazany polycounter lvl 8

  11:12AM

  Xoliul said:

  Just tried it out, I find it all a bit confusing... Even your docs don't provide much of an oversight into the general workflow, it dives into super specific examples right away.
  My main issue is I can't seem to find where to do the traditional High to Lowpoly baking. How/where do I mark some meshes as low, some as high? Does it do any kind of filtering or matching?
  
  From what i can tell this was more conceived with a lowpoly bevel first idea, but it's not entirely clear to me if that's the case? If so, the radius control is really important, and probably previewing it as well, this doesn't seem to be very easy?

  
  

  Thanks for the feedback.. yeah I get it. I'm missing quite some info in the docs it seems. I'll have to update it and add some more info about these kind of things.

  
  

  But to give you an explanation, the selection workflow works this way :

  For traditional High to Low :

  You can use the both tabs the EdgeBevel with the enabled Transfer checkbox or just the Normals Transfer.

  The difference is, that the simple Normals Transfer doesn't do any edge beveling - that's the only difference. So if you don't want that - use the Normals Transfer tab as it will be faster.

  
  

  As for the selections - currently you cannot mark objects as targets/sources and it works automatically based on a selection (this applies for the "Transfer") :

    * anything that you select is considered as a Source
    * last object that you select is considered as a Target
      * this way you may bake any number of source objects into the target
    * the selection also takes into account all the children of the objects, so for example you can have a single group object that has all the sources and a single group object that has all the targets
      * this way it you can bake multiple sources into multiple targets
    * it works in a WYSIWIG manner, if the object is hidden -> it doesn't render
  
  So for particular examples. Let's say you bake :

  Single highpoly to single lowpoly :

    * just select highpoly first, lowpoly as last and use NormalsTranfer tab (or Normals EdgeBevel with Transfer enabled)
    
  Single highpoly, multiply lowpoly objects:
    * put all the lowpoly objects into a single hierarchy object
    * select highpoly first, select the hierarchy object last - then bake using transfer
    
  Multiple highpoly objects, single lowpoly:
    * select all the highpoly objects OR put all the highpoly objects into a hierarchy and select just the hierarchy parent
    * select lowpoly object as last -> then bake using transfer
  
  Multiple highpoly and multiple lowpoly objects:
    * put all the lowpoly objects into a single hierarchy
    * select all the highpoly objects OR put all the highpoly objects into a hierarchy and select just the hierarchy parent
    * select the lowpoly hierarchy parent last -> then bake using transfer
    
  

  That said.... this automatic way works really well for my workflow, but I undeerstand that others might need some finer control over what is considered as a source/target and I plan to add a "selection manager" that will handle this. Think of it similarly as the TransferMaps dialog in Maya - where you can set target and source objects manually.

  
  

  Edit : Making a preview for the edge bevel might not be possible due to the fact that I need to support "all" and this heavily depends on whether the DCC has that shader or not. This is one of the limitations of this approach. TBH personally I just do a quick bake as it doesn't take that long to render, usually under few seconds, and see the baked version instead of the "preview" as it's often decieving - when I'm limited by a texture resolution for example. But yes I understand the need for a preview, but I'm currently not sure how to approach this.

  
  

  Please let me know, if it makes sense or not as I'm already used to it so I don't really think about it.

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