Bake From Original

Remeshed it? Keep the look.

Reducing a model’s polygon count can leave you with lightweight geometry but none of its original material detail. Bake From Original transfers that appearance onto the new mesh and creates a connected PBR material in Blender.

Use it to prepare game props, optimize downloaded assets, bake a retopologized model, or turn a multi-part object into one textured mesh. Your originals stay untouched.

Three ways to bake

Create Target & Bake
Select your original model. The add-on creates a reduced target, prepares its UVs, and bakes the appearance in one operation.

Bring your own low-poly
Already made a target with Quadify, QuadriFlow, another remesher, or manual retopology? Bake onto that mesh while keeping its prepared UV layout.

Bake All
Place multiple targets in a collection, review their source matches, and process them as a batch.

What you get

• Base Color, Normal, Roughness, Metallic, Emission, Alpha, and Ambient Occlusion maps, each selectable as needed
• Optional packed ORM texture
• OpenGL or DirectX normal maps
• A new Principled BSDF material with the baked textures connected
• Image textures saved next to your .blend file
• Resolutions from 512px to 8K, plus bake margin, ray distance, and cage controls
• Remembered source associations for easier re-baking

Results on real assets

A portable generator was reduced from 26,419 to 7,922 triangles while retaining visible printed markings in the baked example. A 13-part drill press was reduced from 58,526 to 17,557 triangles and consolidated into one mesh with one texture set.

Results depend on the source model, target geometry, UVs, and bake settings.

Built for asset production

Bake From Original handles multi-part source models, multiple materials, and modifiers. It performs bake work on temporary copies, leaving the original objects and materials available for future changes. It works offline without external dependencies.

Compatibility: Blender 4.2 LTS–5.2. Baking uses Cycles. Windows has been tested; macOS and Linux have not yet been tested.

Good to know: Create Target & Bake uses decimation, not quad retopology. Normal maps preserve surface detail, but they cannot restore a silhouette lost through aggressive reduction. If topology matters, prepare your low-poly mesh first and use the Bake workflow.