The bake to vertex color functionality could be really great. I’d love to bake more mesh data into verts for procedural material support. As is though, it’s quite inflexible and missing some key per baker features.
- The initial branching of the entire bake process based on an RGBA / grayscale output mode is the first rigid limitation. Ideally one would assign a baker to a destination channel. For example, if I want to bake position to RGB and AO to Alpha. Generically speaking, ideally the user would create a mapping baker output channels to vertex color set channels.
- The above scenario would also in theory be able to support assigning a Position Y coordinate to a given vertex channel, allowing for assigning of individual baker output channels to individual vertex color channels.
- AO looks like it’s cosine weighted. Which is correct for lighting, but doesn’t lend itself well to vertex blending pipeline or stylized application. A linear weighting option would be preferred for that.
- Curvature doesn’t appear to have a sample radius. This can helpful for getting lower frequencies of curvature. The use case I’m after is that I effectively want to smooth out finer details, and have have longer gradients originating from the point of most / least curvature. XNormal had similar functionality to create both high and low frequency curvature. Painter has similar functionality. Having lower frequency curvature is great for threshold blending in the material as you have a more generalized view of “being near an edge” as opposed to “being on an edge”