Hi, I'm Rayn Haque, a 17-year-old indie game developer who recently started learning Unity and Blender. I began coding at 14 during the pandemic, starting with Python and later moving into full-stack web development using Next.js and Prisma. I actually mastered Next.js just by reading its documentation over the course of a month.

As I got older, I decided to focus on a specific field—game development—using Unity and Blender. One major challenge I encountered was that Blender's shader system isn't compatible with Unity’s. This meant I had to bake materials to transfer them, but Blender’s built-in baking system is quite limited. It lacks support for many important map types like metallic, subsurface scattering, and IOR. Additionally, if you forget to mute the metallic map, your baked textures come out too dark. Things get even more complicated when you're working with multiple material slots or baking several objects into one.

I looked for third-party tools to help, but the free options didn’t meet my needs, and I couldn’t afford the paid ones. So, I decided to build my own Blender extension. Despite having less than a year of Blender experience, I jumped into creating one—right around the time Blender 4.0 deprecated traditional add-ons in favor of extensions and made major API changes.

There was very little documentation or tutorials on creating extensions—most resources focused on the old add-on system. I had to join Blender Discord communities, read through Blender’s API docs, Stack Overflow threads, and forum posts to figure things out. It was tough, but after six months of work, I built the first version of my extension. Initially, it supported just base color, normal, metallic, and roughness maps.

Then I added texture packing, which is helpful for games, and even built in an option to invert roughness maps since Unity doesn’t use them directly. Though I never needed UDIMs myself, I added automatic UDIM tile support based on UV coordinates. I kept expanding the feature set—eventually supporting 142 bake types, even though I only needed around eight.

I added many features beyond my original needs simply because I enjoyed the process of building it. Eventually, I realized most of the features were more useful for artists than game developers like me, so I decided to turn it into a product for others to use. And that’s how TexCraft was born.