Feature Request: Bake to Vertex

[MrJRules]

I appreciate this tool so much.

Request: Be able to bake grayscale mesh maps like AO and Curvature to specific channels within vertex colors (R, G, B, A) for game projects. Much like how we pack masks into R, G, B and A channels in an image to both add variety and lower memory footprint, when using a mid poly workflow for modern game engines, baking this data to vertex channels does the same thing, but even cheaper.

Functionality: Dropdown above Bake button that allows the user to choose texture or vertex colors. If texture is chosen, nothing changes, but if vertex is chosen, a new dropdown shows with RGB, R, G, B, and A options. If you choose any individual channel, (example: R), the selected mesh map (AO for instance) bake into the vertices in channel R. Or, if you choose G, and select the Curvature map to bake, this map gets baked to the G channel in each vertex.

Usefulness: Memory is costly in game development where hundreds of thousands of objects and textures are put into memory at any given time. For the same reason we pack mesh maps like AO and Curvature into image channels like R and G, it is even more efficient to use vertex colors to drive texture visibility on meshes in a more general sense. So, for instance, if all meshes had an AO baked using the mid poly workflow in games, we could have a master shader instance drive dirt and grime for a whole scene with merely a single slider and change the feel of an entire scene using the same exact meshes, with no overhead.

QoL: Just as textools have streamlined the baking of mesh map textures in blender UV editor, so would textools streamline vertex light baking for the good of all.

Example images from the game Ascent, which who uses vertex color AO baking to generate a variety of environments with the same 8k assets they generated and reuse everywhere.

Colors and light without AO applied

Color and Light with Baked Vertex AO applied

This feature would be a godsend. Please consider asap.

[franMarz]

I was considering to add the "Bake to VC" option, which bakes the selected mode to the active Vertex Color layer (nowadays, to the active Color Attribute). I hope that will be enough to achieve what you're after.

[MrJRules]

This would be very helpful.

However, game engines only pull one vertex attribute into engine. We need a way to store multiple vertex color bakes without using more than one attribute. Is there no way to bake to a specific color in a vertex bake? Or at least copy from a bake to a channel in another vertex attribute? That way we can manually copy the full color data and pack it into one color attribute? Us game developers would be forever grateful if this could be done.