Baking

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

Workflow

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

Map types

• 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.

Common settings

• 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-specific

• 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).

Per-object bake direction

In Object Properties → Chisel → Bake:

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

Use cases

• Trim sheets — bake an SDF stack to a normal + mask trim sheet for use in a real-time engine
• Displacement maps — height-bake a stylized SDF for terrain or panel detail
• Game-ready textures — combined normal + mask via Mask as Alpha in a single texture

See also

• Operations: Convert — full SDF-to-mesh conversion
• Quality — runtime ray-march settings (separate from bake settings)