---
title: Baking
order: 6
---


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

![Bake settings](../assets/rendersettings-bake.webp)

![Bake panel preview](../assets/bake-panel.webp)

## 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*:

| Direction | Looking |
|---|---|
| Top *(default)* | +Z down |
| Bottom | -Z up |
| Front | -Y forward |
| Back | +Y backward |
| Left | -X right |
| Right | +X left |

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

## v3 fixes

In 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.

## See also

- [Operations: Convert](../operations/convert.md) — full SDF-to-mesh conversion
- [Quality](quality.md) — runtime ray-march settings (separate from bake settings)