Height Baker (blender addon)

Height Baker is a convenient tool for baking height map in blender.

Advantages

- The tool keep your camera, render and resolution settings, all unchanged !!

- Automatically calculate correct object and camera position, camera distance, output aspect ratio, color profile, and color balance of the output (black and white, normalize to 0 - 1.0).

- Work for one selected object.

What is Height Map

Height map is very useful for normal bump and displacement.

You can modeling your texture easily in blender (eg: make a Sci-fi panel), then use this tool to bake it to height map.

(above model used the new displacement feature of blender, Cycles's experimental real vector displacement with adaptive sub-division)

Usage

- Select one object

- In Object Mode, right click and select "Height Baker" in context menu

- You can change settings in the Left-Bottom panel of Height Baker

- File name : This is the output path and file name. You should type a filename for it in the popup dialog box.

- Resolution setting : the image size of your output (the longer side. The scale of width and height is calculated by the size of your model.)

- Padding : the extra padding space around the texture

- Square output : if you want a square texture you may check it.

- Please note the the tool bake the height map from the top (Z position) of the object, so your model details should be facing to Z direction. 

- The default output file is Open-EXR format. (it is recommended because it has 32 bit depth for height and linear color. It is needed for height map and work great in blender)

- You can view the output by blender's built-in Image Editor. (Texture painting view). This is just an optional step. 

- The tool does not link your output with the blender file, and it does not create any material with the output. 

Tested

Tested on all popular blender versions including : 

Blender 2.83, 2.92, 2.93 and 3.0.0 alpha., all passed.

Updates

Version 1.3.1:

• Fixed a minor bug that cause error on Blender 3.1

Version 1.3.0:

• Now you can choose the output Image Format !
• Support the following formats : Open EXR (32 bit)PNG (16 bit)JPEG (8 bit)TIFF (16 bit)

Version 1.2.1:

- Renamed "Save path" to "File name". 

- Added a checking for empty file name. (after choosing the directory, you need to input a file name)

Version 1.2.0:

This is an important update :

- Blender's python API does not use any compression for OpenEXR !! So it caused huge file size. I corrected it and the output file size is very small now.  (About 2 MB image file)

Version 1.1.1:

- Minor bug fix

Version 1.1.0:

- Improved the baking method, more efficient and stable.

Version 1.0.0:

- Initial Release

Hope you like it. Enjoy !