Baking

Bake texture maps directly from the SDF using orthographic raymarching. No mesh conversion required.

Bake settings

Bake panel preview

Workflow

Switch to the Chisel render engine.
Open Render Properties → Bake.
Enable the map types you want.
Set the bake direction (per object via Object Properties → Bake Direction) and resolution.
Choose an output directory.
Click Bake Maps.

Normal: RGB world-space normals (R = X, G = Y, B = Z). Computed from the SDF gradient, so all rounding, blending, and boolean detail is captured exactly.
Height: grayscale linear depth (white = nearest, black = farthest). Use for displacement maps, parallax, terrain.
Mask: silhouette (white surface on black background). Use for alpha masks, trim-sheet boundaries.
Diffuse: matcap-shaded render of the SDF. Saved scene-linear on every Blender version, so it matches the viewport.

Resolution: 128–4096 pixels along the longer axis (default 1024)
Padding: 0.0–0.5 edge crop fraction (default 0.0). Removes the black border on baked normals.
Max Steps: 64–4096 ray-march iterations (default 1024).
Output Directory: where the maps land.

Mask Edge Blend: 0–50 pixel softening on the mask edge (default 0.0).
Mask as Alpha: embed the mask in the normal map’s alpha channel (handy for packed textures in real-time engines).

In Object Properties → SDF → Bake:

Plus Flip (swap horizontal axis), Height Origin, and Height Range for fine-tuning the height-map’s grayscale window.

Since 3.0.0 baking routes through the same wgpu renderer the viewport uses, which fixed two long-standing bugs:

All-black maps for boolean objects: chains now upload their per-primitive data the same way the viewport does, so booleans bake correctly instead of coming out solid black.
Standalone bakes rendering the wrong output map: a normal, mask, or height bake of a standalone primitive now produces the map you asked for instead of falling back to the diffuse/empty branch.