Description:

Sequenced Bake is a Blender add-on designed to streamline the process of baking animated materials. With this add-on, users can efficiently bake material sequences and pack them into sprite sheets or flipbook assets with a range of customizable options, enhancing their workflow and output quality.

Key Features:

• Animated Material Baking: Seamlessly bake animated materials over a sequence of frames.
• Map Type Definition: Select and define specific map types (e.g., combined, diffuse, normal, roughness, emission) to be baked.
• Customizable Output Resolution: Set the desired resolution for the baked maps to meet your project needs.
• Organized Directory Structure: Automatically saves baked maps into map type directories for easy access and organization.
• Sprite Sheet and Flipbook Creation: Create sprite sheets or flipbook assets from the baked material sequences. You can also pack any sequence of images into a sprite sheet using this tool.

Usage:

Baking Material Map Sequences:

Render Engine: Cycles. (Required)

1. Create your object and material.
2. Animate your material using keyframes.
3. Set the start and end frames for the keyframes. The number of keyframes will determine the number of images generated.
4. Define the output path in the sequence bake panel found in the 3D view N panel.
5. Set the image size for the texture maps that will be baked.
6. Select the texture maps you want to be baked.
7. Press Bake.

• The material maps will be baked out one at a time and saved to subfolders in the output destination.

Generating Sprite Sheets:

1. First, you need to have baked your material maps OR have existing images you want to pack into a sprite sheet.
2. Select the directory containing the subfolders for the material maps or image sequences.
3. Modify the settings for the number of columns and rows and the size of the cells for each frame of animation.
4. Choose a start and end frame for your animation. For example, if you have 300 frames of animation but only want to pack frames 150 to 250, set the start frame to 150 and the end frame to 250.
5. Click Generate Sprite Sheet.

• This will pack all of the frames defined by the start and end frames onto the newly created sprite sheet.

• The combined size of the cells will determine how large the generated sprite sheet will be. Example: If I have 64 cells of animation at 128x128, the generated sprite sheet will be 1024x1024.

Versions:

Since many users continue to use older versions of Blender for compatibility reasons, I will provide updates for these versions as well.

• Sequence Bake for Blender 3.1 -> 4.1

Notes:

• New directories are created in the output path you defined for each of the map types to keep them organized. You can observe them populate during the baking process.

• Blender might appear frozen or non-responsive while it bakes out the texture maps, but you will see the UI update.

• Depending on the output size you choose for the images and the complexity of the material, some bakes may take longer than others.