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.
Restrict rendered object visibility to all objects contained in a single root collection.
Export the background plane for previewing your texture in other software.
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.
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.
Many bakers either support or require manual links to the Principled BSDF node (the node before material output) in the Material to bake properly. This means you may need to have the Shader Editor open to continue, with materials applied to your rendered objects.
GrabDoc does the grunt work behind the scenes of adding the bakers' node group to each rendered object's materials, as well as cleanup afterward. 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.
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.
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 the memory footprint.
Continue reading advanced documentation here.