Blender Baking Basics:
Why Your Bake Turns
Black and How to Fix It

In Blender Lighting Basics: Placing Your First Light Without an HDRI, the coffee cup scene was lit with two Area lights. Those two lights are what give the cup its shading.

To take a model from Blender to the web or a game engine, glTF is the usual format. As a test, export the scene before baking with "File" → "Export" → "glTF 2.0" and open it in a web viewer. How to use the viewer is covered in the column "Viewing the exported glTF in a web viewer".

Under the viewer's own lighting, the whole cup is evenly bright. Turn that lighting off and the cup and table go completely black. The Area lights you placed in Blender can't be exported to glTF.

So instead, you bake the lighting and shading into a texture. That's baking. A baked texture stays on the model when you export it to glTF, so the look you had under the lights in Blender comes through even without any lights.

When you bake, a UV map decides which part of the cup goes to which part of the image. So start by checking what the cup's UVs look like.

Switch to the "UV Editing" tab at the top of the screen, select the cup, and press Tab to enter Edit Mode. The UVs for the side of the cup spread well beyond the 0-1 square. That's because they were scaled up to fit the logo in the UV unwrapping article.

Only the parts of a UV map that sit inside the square can be baked. With the current UVs, most of the side of the cup is outside the square, so its lighting has nowhere to go. These UVs also position the logo, so rebuilding them would move it. Instead, keep the original UVs and add a second UV map just for baking.

Open Object Data Properties (the green triangle icon) and press "+" under "UV Maps". A new UV map appears below "UVMap". Double-click it and rename it bake_uv.

The new bake_uv is highlighted in blue, meaning it's the one selected in the list. Baking uses whichever UV map is selected here. Leave the camera icon to the right on "UVMap", since that's the map the logo uses for display.

In Edit Mode, press A to select everything, then press U and choose "Smart UV Project". In the settings window, set "Island Margin" to 0.02, uncheck "Correct Aspect", and press "Unwrap". If "Correct Aspect" is left on, the islands get squeezed sideways to match the aspect ratio of the logo image.

Unwrapping splits the UVs into several separate pieces, called "islands". With Smart UV Project, every island ended up inside the square without overlapping. The handle is part of the same object as the cup, so its islands sit in the same square.

"Island Margin" sets the gap between islands. Overlapping islands won't cause an error, but where they overlap, only the color of the face baked last is kept. Apply the image to the model and every face that overlapped shows that one color.

Before preparing the image, switch back to the "Layout" tab at the top of the screen and check the saucer's material.

Select the saucer and open Material Properties. If 2 appears to the right of the material name, the saucer is sharing the cup's material.

Left like this, applying the baked image to the cup's material later would apply it to the saucer too, and the saucer wouldn't display correctly. Click the 2 to create a material just for the saucer. It's named cup.001, and the number disappears. If no 2 is shown, you can skip this step.

Switch to the "Shading" tab at the top of the screen and select the cup. In the Shader Editor, add an Image Texture with Shift + A → "Texture" → "Image Texture".

Click "New" on the node, set the name to bake_cup and both "Width" and "Height" to 1024, and press "New Image".

Don't connect this Image Texture to anything. Click the node to select it. A selected node has a white outline.

Since Blender 5.0, baking won't work unless the Image Texture node is selected. Clicking any other node deselects it, so check for the white outline before you press "Bake".

The handle uses a different material from the body of the cup. Every material needs its own Image Texture to bake; a material without one isn't baked at all.

Switch "Slot 1" to "Slot 2" at the top of the Shader Editor to show the handle's material.

Add an Image Texture here too. This time, don't press "New"; choose bake_cup from the node's image icon instead. Using the same image as the cup body bakes the body and the handle into a single image. Leave this node unconnected and selected as well.

Set "Render Engine" in Render Properties to "Cycles". With EEVEE, the "Bake" panel doesn't appear.

Open "Bake" near the bottom of Render Properties. Leave "Bake Type" at its default, "Combined". Combined bakes the look of the scene under your lights as it is: the cup's color plus the light that reaches it directly from the lights and the light that arrives indirectly after bouncing off nearby objects.

With the cup selected, press "Bake". When "Baking map saved to internal image, save it externally or pack it" appears at the bottom of the screen, the bake is done.

bake_cup appears in the Image Editor at the lower left. If it doesn't, pick it from the image icon at the top. The cup's UV islands now contain the baked lighting and shading.

Baking uses the settings under "Sampling" → "Render" in Render Properties. With "Denoise" on, the bake comes out without grain.

At this point, the baked image only exists inside Blender. Save it as a file with "☰" → "Image" → "Save As" in the Image Editor.

Once it's saved, don't move the image file to another folder or rename it. Blender loads the image from where it was saved, and if it can't find the file, the cup shows solid pink in place of the image.

Now apply the baked image to the cup.

Add an Emission shader with Shift + A → "Shader" → "Emission" and connect it as follows. The Principled BSDF gets disconnected, but leave the node in place.

At this stage, the baked image isn't in the right place, and the cup looks scrambled.

When nothing is connected to the Image Texture's "Vector" input, it uses "UVMap", the map with the camera icon. The bake used bake_uv, so to put the image in the right place, you need to point it at the same UV map when applying it.

Add a UV Map node with Shift + A → "Input" → "UV Map" and choose bake_uv in the node's field. Connect the UV Map's "UV" output to the "Vector" input of bake_cup.

Connect the handle's material ("Slot 2") the same way. If its UV Map field is left on "UVMap", the handle doesn't display correctly either.

The image goes through Emission so it shows at exactly the brightness it was baked at. Connect it to the Principled BSDF instead and the lights hit the baked shading a second time. There's more on this in "Export the baked image as an unlit material".

Switch the viewport to "Rendered" and hide both lights with the eye icon in the Outliner.

The table and wall went dark, but the cup keeps the brightness it had under the lights. The lighting and shading are baked into the image. The saucer looks bright because the cup, now using an Emission shader, is lighting it.

The baked shading doesn't change when the lights go off. Orbit the view and the bright and dark sides of the cup stay exactly where they were. If you change a light's position or strength, you need to bake again.

When you're done checking, turn the lights back on with the eye icon.

If you plan to light the model again on the web or in a game engine, bake only the cup's color. An image baked with "Combined" already contains the lighting and shading, and lighting it again can give you a result you didn't intend.

Before baking, reconnect the "Surface" input of the Material Output to the Principled BSDF in both the cup body's and the handle's materials. While Emission is connected, the cup's Base Color on the Principled BSDF isn't included in the bake.

Set "Bake Type" to "Diffuse", and the "Influence" options change to three checkboxes. Uncheck "Direct" and "Indirect" and leave only "Color".

Baking with these settings overwrites the image you baked earlier with "Combined". To keep that image, create a new one first and switch the Image Texture in both the body's and the handle's materials to it before baking.

Select the cup and press "Bake". This time the image contains no lighting or shading. Only the cup's color is baked in.

The handle, though, came out completely black. That's because the handle's material has "Metallic" set to 1. Why metal turns black, and how to fix it, comes next.

Connect the baked image to "Base Color" and it still reacts to the lighting on the web or in a game engine. To show it without being affected by lighting, you need to build the material differently.

Turn off the viewer's lighting and the cup connected through Base Color goes completely black. An image connected to Base Color depends on the viewer's lighting to be seen.

The cup exported as a material that ignores lighting (Unlit), on the other hand, stays bright with the lighting off. Whatever the viewer's lighting does, it shows the shading in the image exactly as it was baked.

If you export with the image connected only to Emission, you get a self-illuminating material rather than Unlit. Because it isn't true Unlit, it may look different depending on where you open it.

The glTF export settings have no option for Unlit. Connect the material's nodes as follows and it exports as Unlit.

This setup uses Emission for whatever the camera sees and Transparent BSDF for everything else. Build the handle's material the same way.

Export with "File" → "Export" → "glTF 2.0". The default settings are fine.

If baking isn't working, go through these five from the top.

We baked the lighting and shading on the cup into an image and checked that the brightness stays with the lights turned off. Along the way we also covered baking the color only, why a baked image comes out black and how to fix it, and how to build the material for glTF export.

If that feels like a lot to hold on to, these five points are enough for a successful bake.

That completes our tour of Blender basics. We built a coffee cup, set up its materials, added a logo, then lit and rendered it. Last of all, we baked the lighting and shading into an image so the look carries over to the web and game engines. All the articles are collected in "Blender Basics".