How to bake to vertex color in Blender 3.6?

[noone1520]

It's so frustrating to me how the one thing keeping me from making the mods I want, is that it is seemingly impossible the bake to vertex colors in Blender 3.6; it's slightly maddening. I don't get why SCS blender tools doesn't include some way to easily bake ambient occlusion to vertex colors, cuz I don't see any other way to do it with an SCS material. How are we expected to do it, substance painter or something? SCS's blender tutorials are all out of date and useless as far as I can tell. Somehow I figured it out before, many months ago, but now I've forgotten and I can't get anything to work.

I've precisely followed Dotec's tutorial '[Blender 3.2] How to bake to vertex color', because that's what I thought worked last time, but now on 3.6 there is no option in bake for targeting 'Color Attributes', only 'Active Color Attributes', so I have no idea what to do now; that tutorial just doesn't work anymore. I made a bunch of models again, now I can't figure out any way to bake to vertex colors, which is the last thing I need to do, the one necessary thing I don't know how to do before I can get my mods into the game.

Is there any easy way to bake to vertex colors? It boggles my mind how easy it used to be in previous Blender versions, and for some reason it's now impossible.

If anyone could help, I'd be grateful, but if not, I am really gonna give up. I hate blender so much, could it possibly be any less intuitive?

[Dotec]

For this tutorial I take a roof grill with a cabin roof and want to bake the vertex color, so I don't have to create an image for the roof grill.

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Before I can press the bake button, I have to create the Color Attributes, otherwise blender doesn't want to bake. You can create a new material and set up a scs material, after that click 'Add vertex colors to all'. You can delete then the scs material, we don't need it anymore.

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After that I create a new material with the following attributes. The ColorRamp is important, otherwise it will bake to higher values >0.5 than scs blender tools would like to have.

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Now we set the render engine to Cycles, change the Device to GPU Compute, scroll down to the bake section

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Select the bake type to Emit and Output Target to Color Attributes

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To see the result better, we change the viewport a bit. Click on the white circle, Lighting > MatCap and set Attribute to the Color section

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Now click on the button 'Bake' and now you can see the result

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Tutorial from my site: https://dotec3d.eu/forum/viewtopic.php?t=4

[noone1520]

Hello Dotec, have you tried that in Blender 3.6? I follow your tutorial but when it comes time to pick a target in bake I only have 'Active Color Attribute', not 'Color attributes'. Is there a way I could use 3.2 instead of 3.6?

[Dotec]

you only have 2 options in target:
- image textures
- active color attribute

well what could the answer be? I guess not image texture.
I still use my method in blender 4.5

[Jaymzarf]

@noone1520 , 'Active Color Attribute' & 'Color attributes' mean the same thing. The naming depends on the Blender version, the native system language, and any translation overlay.

[noone1520]

Hmm, I don't know what's wrong then, must be something with my models. I've followed the tutorial and when I choose 'active color attribute', it turns black or it's all messed up.

It's good to know that it still works all the way to 4.5, so I guess now I'll need to figure out what else I'm doing wrong. Thanks, I'm glad to know your tutorial is still useful.

I tried it on the monkey model thing and it did work, so my models must be messed up somehow.

[noone1520]

Thank you very much, I was able to figure it out. My model was messed up. After revising the model your tutorial worked perfectly.