Baking from one Object to another with "Selective to Active"

This tutorial is fairly similar to Baking With Multiple Materials on a single Object but goes over how one might do this with Selected to Active

• Just like with the previous tutorial we're going to want to add a PBR Bake node to every material in the 'selected' base object and fill the bake node inputs with the values. However this time, we're going to generate the textures in a single material on the 'active' baked object and then setup the baking scene with the "Set" button.

• Next we're going to go to the Scene Properties > Bake panel and turn on "Selected to Active", This allows you to bake the material outputs from the selected, or original, object and the active, or bake, object

• Now select the base object, hold shift and select the bake object.

• In the node editor for the 'Selected' base object, make sure the PBR Bake base_color output is connected to the Material Output node (this can be any corresponding output but we're using base_color for this tutorial)

• In the node editor for the 'Active' baking object, select the base color texture

• under the Scene Properties > Bake Panel change the bake type to emit and press bake

• continue these steps for every texture, for the Normal texture make sure you set the Bake Type to 'Normal' as this output is a Diffuse BSDF and not an emission node

Currently there is no way to "auto bake" outputs via the bake panel with this method but it's rather quick with the Node Wrangler add-on enabled. Node Wrangler allows you to Ctrl+Shift+left Click the PBR Bake Node which will connect the output to the material output node. Or even better Alt+Shift+right click drag from the PBR Bake Node to the material output node and you can select which pbr bake output will connect

As was said in the Masking with vertex color tutorial, this process is fairly similar to the vanilla Selected To Active baking and the pbr bake node speeds up the process