About RGBA Transfer

RGBA Transfer is an addon that allows to bake, edit and transfer RGBA channels. It has a wrapper around the native Blender baking function which extends existing functionality. It adds operators to edit the color and the alpha channels of images and mesh color attributes.

	Baking from a high poly source mesh object to a target low poly mesh object
	Baking an image with alpha to a target mesh object base color image texture
	Baking from a source mesh object to a target mesh object with different topology
These animated images are accelerated.

Purpose

RGBA Transfer covers multiple uses:

• images, mesh color attributes or vertex colors baking

• transferring color and alpha channels of images or mesh color attributes from a source to a target

• baking PBR maps

What is baking?

RGBA Bake relies on baking to transfer image or mesh color attributes. This is a general simplified explanation of baking. The process of baking means that texture and lighting information is pre-computed and stored as static data.

It can be used to:

• export procedural maps outside authoring software (Blender or others) as static data

• store the result of a computationally expensive shader as static data

• capture topology details such as normals, curvature in a map

The baking is performed by casting rays from an object to a target. It retrieves information thanks to these rays and reconstruct the data.

Practical use cases

Example A: Transfer image A in mesh object A from UV map A to UV map B

There are changes made to a UV map but there is already paint work on the model

Example B: Transfer image A from mesh object A to mesh object B

There are changes made to the topology but there is already paint work on the model

Note

• Mesh object A is a copy of mesh object B made before the topology changes are made to mesh object B

• Mesh object A and mesh object B have a similar shape but may have different topology

• If mesh object A and mesh object B have a lot of overlapping geometry, it can be useful to increase the Cage Extrusion value with small amount

Example C: Transfer image color and alpha channels

Transfer color and alpha channels of transparent image textures

Note

• The order of layering depends on the order of the transfer entries in the transfer list.

Note

• Transferring multiple maps such as the base color, the roughness and the normals is a setup that is quite involved because it requires to create a transfer entry for each map.