Baking is conceptually simple and procedurally fiddly, and the settings that trip people are the same ones every time: the cage, the extrusion, the ray distance and which image node is selected. These pieces cover what each one does, the shortcut for reading a bad bake (stray colour means the cage is too large, blank patches mean it is too small), and why mesh maps are most valuable as mask inputs rather than as final textures.
An AI map generator makes base colour, roughness, metallic and normal maps. Which generate well, which must be baked from geometry, and why.
7 min readBaking normal, AO and curvature maps in Blender: the settings that actually matter, why bakes come back wrong, and how to run the whole pass as one brief.
7 min readLooking for the full set? The AI agent for Blender pillar collects every automation guide, and the blog carries the rest.