Happy Monday, Everyone! Today we are happy to announce the release of a brand new feature for our viewer which has been in production for a very long time. We’re quite excited by the possibilities offered by the new Bakes On Mesh feature for our content creators, and judging by their engagement thus far, they are too!

What is Bakes On Mesh?

In short, Bakes On Mesh is a feature that allows you to apply a server baked texture to a mesh attachment, similar to the way that standard system avatars currently work. Using this feature, you’ll be able to apply several texture layers to customize skin, tattoos, clothing, etc on your mesh object as a single server baked texture without the need for multiple transparent layers.

Major Features

Any face of a mesh object can be textured using any of the server baked textures.

The corresponding region of the system avatar is hidden if any attached mesh is using a baked texture.

New texture bake channels have been introduced to give more control over how meshes get textured.

A new “universal wearable” is now provided with support for the new texture channels.

Benefits

Avoid the need for appliers, leading to an easier customization workflow.

Avoid the need for “onion” avatars, leading to fewer meshes and fewer textures at display time.

Allow for customization of any mesh that’s set to use Bakes on Mesh by simply equipping the appropriate wearables, without needing to modify the mesh itself.

You can read more about how Bakes On Mesh works, and the wide variety of possible uses, in our Knowledge Base article on the topic, or watch an early demo created after our original post! We are excited to put this new tool into your hands and see what you all come up with!

You can download the Bakes on Mesh enabled viewer release and start checking out Bakes on Mesh now.