Bake transparent textures onto plane I'm trying to bake a branch made from a cut out atlas onto a single plane for a tree to be used in a game engine.


(Branch mesh with applied textures)


(Branch ready to bake onto a flat plane)

However, when I bake, the transparency on the textures does not go through to the bake. Instead, the transparency is replaced with a black fill.


(Bake result, replaces texture transparency with black fill)

I'm in the middle of creating another quite complex pine tree and I need to bake the branches onto single planes, very much like the SpeedTree Leaf Map Makers tool (aka "Clustering") as seen in this video demonstration.

I've wondered if there was a way to cutout transparency like what shaders can do in Unity and Unreal, using the transparency to cut out the geometry, making a very high poly mesh, then transparency won't be an issue. And I don't want to have to manually cut around every single leaf there.

I've done a lot of searching and have not found a way to do this without SpeedTree. Surely SpeedTree isn't the only program that can do this... right?

Thanks.

EDIT: Here is my material setup just in case anyone is wondering:
not sure if this will help but.. the way I do this, is by baking a Diffuse Color only, from the mask that I'm using as the factor in the mix shader with the transparency node.. thus having a mask image to use.
you can also you the emission shader with the emit bake.. probably a better choice.