Getting Started
This page will describe the high-level functionality contained within GrabDoc.
Below is a cheat sheet quick starter, in case that's all you need:
When starting a new scene, you will need to run GrabDoc's initialization process.
Simply click Setup Scene at the top of the header and GrabDoc will do the rest! The rest of the UI should immediately become visible.
If you ever need to remove all GrabDoc data from the scene, just click the X button to the right of the renamed Rebuild Scene button. This button can also be useful to repair old scenes in cases where you get an error after updating to a new version of GrabDoc, likely due to stale node groups.
NOTE: most UI elements in GrabDoc include tooltips (hover over with mouse) describing basic functionality, you can always read these if you forget specific information without needing to come back here.
Scene configuration, objects generated by GrabDoc may be configured globally from here.
Quick access to the most common viewport / render visibility settings.
Disabling background plane render visibility enables exporting with transparency (A Channel).
World scale of the plane and parented camera; larger world scale places the camera further away.
Subdivides the grid for easy snapping and quick measurements.
Attach any square texture image to model with underlaid reference.
Texture export configuration, includes most of the options you expect when exporting a render from native Blender.
Based on: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/files/media/image_formats.html#saving-images
Allows you to select between the GrabDoc and Marmoset Toolbag 3&4 baking engines. Marmoset Toolbag baking provides a more grounded baking result with less overall "quirks", at the cost of flexibility. Bakers that require socket connections are not compatible with Marmoset Toolbag as it is not compatible with Blender's Shader Editor.
Marmoset Toolbag 5 is not currently supported as no contributor owns it, feel free to make an issue if newer version throw a specific exception.
This functionality is not available on the Extensions platform due to licensing restrictions.
By default, the output path is set to a relative path right next to your project file. GrabDoc will not let you export if the project file has not been saved, you can get behind this by setting a manual / absolute path.
Supports the most common texture map formats, including:
- PNG (8/16 bit)
- TIFF (8/16 bit)
- TGA (8 bit)
- EXR (16/32 bit)
PNG format compression is lossless.
Based on: https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/cycles/render_settings/film.html#pixel-filter
A higher filter width can improve aliasing or "sharp" pixels. Some bakers like Material ID benefit from very low filter widths to improve masking and color picker performance.
Restrict rendered object visibility to all objects contained in a single root collection.
Output a "packed" texture when exporting. Comes with additional option for automatically deleting the individually exported textures that were packed.
Configure, preview, and individually export bakers. All bakers have extensive unique and shared customizability with self-explanatory tooltips.
Allows you to preview your baker result in the viewport in real-time utilizing the EEVEE, Cycles, or Workbench render engines! This automation avoids needing to constantly re-export and validate newly baked textures.
While Map Preview is a stable feature, it can be good to avoid doing modeling work while in the preview to avoid risk of running into an error.
Creating multiple of the same baker is as simple as clicking the plus (+) button to the far right of each baker. New bakers will have default settings.
You can create your own material Node Groups and feed it to the Custom baker type, useful for more niche baking cases.
GrabDoc can read the inputs of the LAST node in your material's node tree (the node before Material Output), which is usually a Principled BSDF node.
Many bakers either support or require manual links to the last node to bake properly. This means you may need to have the Shader Editor open to continue, with materials applied to your rendered objects. Below is a GIF showing this scenario with Emissive and Base Color respectively:
GrabDoc does a ton of work behind the scenes, among adding the bakers' node group to each rendered object's materials non-destructively. If an object' material slot does not contain a material, a temporary material will be automatically generated.
Bakers requiring input connections:
- Roughness
- Base Color
- Emissive
- Metallic
NOTE: You aren't technically restricted to using the Principled BSDF node in your materials. As long as the input names of the "last" node are identical to what the baker is expecting, it will correctly link everything correctly.
Use textures generated from prior bakes as "mix-ins" for new bakes!
Below is a standard example of possible use cases; mixing normal maps or getting occlusion data from pre-baked normal textures (lines visible in preview are GIF artifacts):
At the top right of the Bake Maps UI (wheel cog icon), you can configure the visibility of all existing bakers in the scene.
Allows you to configure and manually pack the last exported textures from the Output panel.
When packing with RGB bakers (as opposed to grayscale), the channel packer will pick the respective channel of the channel it is being packed into. For example, if you plug in the Normals baker into the G packed channel, the G channel of the exported normal map will be packed into the same channel of the new texture.
A Pack on Export setting is available in the Output panel if you'd like this functionality to run on every export.
NOTE: Texture packing is the act of condensing several textures into the RGBA channels of a single texture to decrease memory footprint.
There are a handful of User Preferences you can tweak to slightly shape your personal working experience.
The path to your Marmoset Toolbag 3 or 4 executable. This is necessary for using the Marmoset bridge in GrabDoc.
Attempt to ignore objects out of the relevant camera view from rendering. Can improve render speed in large scenes but may fail to apply materials correctly in niche cases causing void objects in render.
Whether you should automatically leave the camera view when exiting a Map Preview.
By default, pressing escape while in Map Preview automatically exits preview.
This can get in the way of other modal operators, causing some workflow friction.