Bake Material

Tip:Note that this functionality does not work in conjunction with the Node Materials.

This function lets you render the following to one or more separate image files for selected objects (they must subsequently be applied manually):

Channel shaders
The previous 3D SLA shaders: Cheen, Danel, etc.
Material
Lighting
Shadow
Reflection
GI
Ambient Occlusion
Normal maps
Displacement maps
UV maps

If you want to avoid having to subsequently assign the bitmap to a material, then an object, use the Bake Object function. This will, though, greatly limit the control you have opposed to using the manual method.

Tip:Note that the Sculpting feature has its own Bake function in Cinema 4D, which is optimized for use with the Sculpting.

Why bake materials?

Let's assume you want to render an animation, and a complex shader or area shadow has to be rendered for each image. You can, for example, save a lot of render time by baking the shader and projecting it onto the object as a normal image file.

You can even render lighting, bump, Ambient Occlusion, etc. onto the material, which lets you avoid having to light these objects, depending on your scene (in this case, add an Luminance material channel to your material).

The integrated optimized mapping makes sure the UV coordinates are placed in such a manner as to not overlap.

How to Bake

Materials are now baked including all Material tags. Now you simply select the object itself, not the Material tag to be baked. If the object contains several materials, i.e., Material tags, they will be baked, taking hierarchy and alpha channels into consideration – exactly as the object would normally be rendered.

Proceed as follows when you want to bake an object's material

Select the object in the Object Manager. The object must have a Material tag.
From the Object Manager, select Objects / Bake Material. The active object will be assigned a Bake Material tag.
Change the settings in the newly created tag, as needed.
Nothing will be baked until the Bake button in the Options tab is pressed. The render process will be shown in the preview window in the same tab.

The Bake Material tag will remain and be saved with the scene so you can keep a good overview of your previous work. An object can have numerous Bake Material tags!

In addition, several materials can be baked simultaneously – simply select the desired Bake Material tags and click on Bake.

In rare cases, flawed material baking can result from inaccuracies in calculation. If this happens, white pixels can be seen, placed randomly on your image file.
Solution: Set the image file or shader's Blur Offset somewhat higher than 0%.

Make sure the polygon Normals are oriented equally to the outside (i.e. on the side on which the material is projected) since only these positive polygon sides will be baked.

One more tip:Make sure the object has a UVW tag. If it does not, one can be created using the Create UVW tag command.